Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Supreme Court upheld a ruling ordering a lawyer convicted of extortion to pay damages to a judge he had defamed on social networks, rejecting an appeal for failing to meet formal requirements. The highest court dismissed the defense's presentation by Alejandro Sánchez Kalbermatten, convicted of extortion, and thus upheld the sentence that obliges him to pay eight million pesos plus interest to Judge Luis María Bunge Campos, a member of the I Chamber of the National Court of Appeals in Criminal and Correctional Matters. The civil lawsuit originated from a series of messages published on the account 'a@askabogados', attributed to the defendant, in which the magistrate was described as a 'corrupt judge' and a 'lazy one with a criminal record'. Bunge Campos initiated the damages claim, which was rejected in the first instance, but later the H Chamber of the National Court of Appeals in Civil Matters reversed that decision and set the compensation. The defense appealed, but the Court rejected the appeal for not complying with the guidelines of agreed 4/2007. Extortion case In August 2023, the Oral Court in Criminal and Correctional Matters No. 3 of the City of Buenos Aires had already sentenced Sánchez Kalbermatten to three years and three months in prison and disqualified him from practicing his profession for twice the length of the sentence, after finding him guilty of attempting to blackmail businessman Sebastián Eskenazi in December 2017. At the end of 2025, the National Court of Cassation in Criminal and Correctional Matters confirmed the conviction, although it reduced the sentence to three years of suspended sentence. The criminal case began in late 2017, when Pablo Brugos met with Eskenazi on behalf of Juan Manuel Ducler and Sánchez Kalbermatten, and told him that they possessed compromising information related to business operations whose dissemination could be avoided in exchange for money. The complaint led to a judicial investigation with hidden cameras and a controlled delivery of one million dollars.
