Politics The government of the United States distanced itself from the trial in Miami in which a federal prosecutor confirmed that the USD 800,000 seized in 2007 from a Venezuelan-American businessman was a campaign contribution from the Venezuelan government to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was then running for president of Argentina.

In a statement published on Wednesday by the Buenos Aires' newspapers Clarín and La Nación and reported by EFE, the Embassy of the United States said that the trial that began on Tuesday against Venezuelan businessman Franklin Durán, accused of acting as a covert Venezuelan agent in the US, "was not an investigation directed towards Argentine officials."

The government of Fernández de Kirchner has not made any comment so far on a case that has made the headlines of the Argentine newspapers and was a source of a diplomatic conflict with the United States earlier this year, when the federal prosecutor in Miami implicated for the first time the Argentine president, as reported by EFE.