Creditors believe that the agro-export giant Vicentin fraudulently suspended payments

Aerial view of the plant of the Argentine agro-exporter Vicentin, located on the Paraná river, in the province of Santa Fe.GUSTAVO SAITA / AFP

The crisis of Vicentin, an Argentine agro-export conglomerate, continues to get complicated.

A group of foreign banks and the public entity Banco Nación have decided to resort to lawsuits for fraud to recover the money that Vicentin owes them.

In one of the criminal cases, the prosecutor has summoned the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, as a witness.

The family that owns it, meanwhile, maintains the purpose of seeking investors to overcome the suspension of payments and denies the accusations of fraud.

The group based in the province of Santa Fe stopped paying suppliers and creditors in December 2019 and paralyzed its factories.

In March of this year it entered bankruptcy.

Two months later, in June, Alberto Fernández announced the expropriation of the conglomerate with the double objective, as he explained, of avoiding its bankruptcy and of making the State present in a sector of the utmost importance for the country's economy.

That unleashed a political storm.

The parliamentary opposition, which considered the measure as a step towards the establishment of a regime similar to the Venezuelan in Argentina, several protest demonstrations and the rejection of the judge who directs the bankruptcy bankruptcy stopped the expropriation.

After a few weeks, Alberto Fernández gave up.

He did so with harsh accusations against Judge Fabian Lorenzini, for "not having allowed the State to know the real liabilities of the company."

Vicentin is an almost hundred-year-old company with enormous influence in the towns of Reconquista and Avellaneda and Judge Lorenzini is attributed an “excess of cooperation” with the family that owns it, to the point that he took over the contest without demanding the accounts for 2019. The complainant creditors consider that the judge committed irregularities.

All Vicentin shareholders belong to the same family.

64 of them, representing 98% of the capital, held a meeting in Avellaneda on Thursday that finally approved the balance sheet for 2019 (with the rejection of 8%) and the management of the managers, the main one, Sergio Nardelli , passed away in August of a heart attack.

13% of the family members-shareholders disapproved of the management.

The assembly appointed a new management team made up of Omar Scarel, Daniel Foschiatti and Estanislao Bougain, all of them technicians or advisers to the company without any shareholding.

The idea, according to Vicentin's sources, was to "make things easier" for the US bank Maxim, hired to search for investors.

But the emergence of a saving partner can be complicated by legal actions taken by creditor banks and dozens of providers.

A group of entities, including Credit Agricole, ING and Rabobank, claim in New York a debt of 500 million dollars and consider that the former directors of Vicentin committed fraud by "emptying" the company and moving funds abroad.

Banco Nación, publicly owned, announced in turn that after the approval of the 2019 balance sheet it would carry out new legal actions.

Vicentin owes 18,700 million pesos (about 300 million dollars) to Banco Nación.

The previous president of Banco Nación, Javier González Fraga, appointed by former president Mauricio Macri and replaced after Alberto Fernández's accession to the Casa Rosada, is charged with alleged irregularities in the granting of credits to Vicentin.

As for President Alberto Fernández, he has been called to testify as a witness by the federal prosecutor Miguel Moreno at the request of the Rosario lawyer Gustavo Feldman, who represents a group of commercial creditors.

The prosecutor wants to verify various journalistic information, according to which on December 6 the directors of Vicentin admitted to the President of the Republic that they had numerous instrumental companies whose main purpose was to increase the group's debt capacity.

Due to his position and the pandemic, Alberto Fernández will likely testify in writing.