Virginia Messi
06/13/2020 - 7:00
- Clarín.com
- Police
The auction room is quite full in the video. The calendar marks December 12, 2016 and what is about to go to auction is tempting: two lots of 8,249 square meters in the heart of the traditional Bosque Alegre neighborhood, in Mar del Plata.
Suddenly, the images show something surprising: a bidder takes the property for just 250,000 pesos (about $ 15,000 at the time the auction occurred) when its market value was $ 400,000. And not only that: so that a whole gang could come true, he had just squeezed a second interested party in the middle of the room, who had innocently raised his hand to make an exceeding offer of 300,000 pesos.
Everything was scandalous, even the role of the hammer who pretended to be distracted by what was happening before his eyes and kept going when the gang surrounding the second interested party looked at him and said "the man was wrong" . The hammer then lowered the hammer to the offer of the band member but with an incredible addition: he gave it up for a gain of 250,000 pesos when the offer had been higher, 251,000 pesos.
As seen in the video -which Clarín accessed along with other details of the investigation- the mafia of the real estate auctions in Mar del Plata operated. "The League", as it is known everywhere and whose weight and influence through the decades has made it almost an urban myth ... throughout the country.
The novelty now is that after an unprecedented investigation carried out by the prosecutor Alejandro Pellegrinelli -with the support of the Technical Assistance Instruction Corps (CATI) the Attorney General- it was possible to arrest the three heads of "The League of buyers of Mar del Silver ", an organization made up of about 25 more people, including figureheads and members of the gang.
Finally someone put the rattle on the cat, you might say. In the operations carried out this week, cash was seized: 1,611,470 pesos and $ 255,330.
After two and a half years of analyzing auction after auction -about 400 videos were analyzed- the Technical Aid Corps led by Javier Pettigiani managed to establish that in the period studied (January 2013 to March 2018) the mafia organization invested the equivalent of $ 10 million in auctions and made a profit infinitely greater than that amount, although very difficult to calculate accurately.
"Nominally, the members of 'La Liga de buyers' have been winners, as bidders (both personally and in commission) in 324 auctions out of the 510 that ended positively during the period studied. This is a percentage of 63.53 In fact, this translates into practically 2 out of 3 judicial auctions carried out at the departmental College of Auctioneers and Public Brokers, the offer of some of its members was imposed, "prosecutors explained after the 25 raids They were held on June 11 by order of the Court of Guarantees 2 of Mar del Plata.
The list of crimes for which the members of the gang are accused is long and it could soon be joined by a formal charge for money laundering , which should be faced by the Federal Justice.
For the time being, the accusation includes: "Illicit association; functional impediment to the normal development of the administration of civil and commercial justice; Fraud to the assets of creditors and debtors; Affecting the liberty, moral and physical integrity of third parties; Violation of the national and provincial public coffers ". The bosses could be sentenced to terms of up to 10 years in prison.
The gang known as "The Buyers League", dedicated to systematically adulterating judicial auctions.
"We are very satisfied because we have to do a little job like this! I believe that what they have done in the Technical Assistance to Instruction Corps has never been done before. And it was all judicial work," the prosecutor pointed out to Clarín. Pellegrinelli. Another of the videos analyzed by Pettigiani's team shows how "La Liga" shielded the auction rooms so that no one entered except them.
That happened on April 13, 2013 when a 29-hectare field on Route 88 was to be auctioned off , in the party of General Alvarado. The base was 665,061 pesos and the buyer took it with him putting only 938 pesos more than that. Sure, as the pictures show, the buyer was one of the gang bosses and was pretty much all alone on site. The auctioneer had almost no time to start the auction he made and in seconds the field was his.
Everything was very irregular to the point that 15 bidders appear in the minutes when there was almost no one. So crude was everything that a judge ended up canceling the auction after receiving an anonymous complaint about the armor that "La Liga" had made in the courtroom based on pure and simple gang.
GL