Daniel Santoro
02/24/2021 1:54 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 02/24/2021 2:34 PM
Between December 2012 and April 2013,
an alert from the SIDE worried Lázaro Báez
.
The warning said that Jorge Lanata's TV program “Periodismo para Todos” connected with the former owner of La Rosadita Federico Elaskar, who had become
a widow of power.
And as in most cases of corruption,
a change or a shortage of money ended up breaking a pact of silence.
It happened that Báez and his entourage pressured Elaskar to sell them the financial SGI or "La Rosadita" in 2011 in exchange for 1,500,000 dollars,
but they only paid him half.
In 2012, Martín Báez and his accountant Daniel Pérez Gadín
were recorded in the security cameras of "La Rosadita" counting 5 million dollars and toasting with whiskey
.
The video of the financier, who worked in the Madero Center, was revealed in 2016 by Telenoche of channel 13 and is another key evidence of the trial.
The young financier had returned from Miami and needed the other $ 750,000 to buy a lithium mine in Catamarca.
Then, a member from Catamarca contacted him with the trade unionist Luis Barrionuevo, who heard
the political "bomb" he had
.
Lied to him.
He told Elaskar that he was going to connect him with Báez to pay the debt.
Instead, days later he put him in touch with the Lanata team.
When the SIDE notified him of the investigation launched by Lanata, Báez was scared and ordered the director of Helvetic Service Group, the Argentine Néstor Ramos, to
repatriate some 60 million dollars that he had deposited in Switzerland in various accounts
.
That black silver had reached the Safra bank and Lombar Odier after passing through various tax havens.
Thus Helvetic transferred the funds from Swiss banks to the Austral Construcciones trust account at Banco Nación.
Ramos
is a fugitive from Argentine Justice and still keeps many secrets of this operation.
Switzerland must decide whether to extradite him.
At the same time, the investigating prosecutor José María Campagnoli had opened a case based on complaints from Elaskar for
threats from Báez's surroundings.
Until that moment, the only one who had denounced Báez had been Elisa Carrió in 2008.
The repatriation was a successful preventive measure, since by a complaint by deputies Graciela Ocaña and Manuel Garrido, the Swiss justice
blocked
a bank account of Martín Báez and two others that have a total of 22 million dollars.
One of them is in the name of the Panamanian
Kinski
foundation
that Báez and his children Martín Antonio, Leandro Antonio, Luciana Sabrina and Melina Soledad integrate.
Another in the name of the Teegan company that Martín Báez had created in Belize, a tax haven, with the advice of Elaskar.
Faced with the possibility of losing the deposited money, Báez hired the study of former judge Maurice Harari - one of the most expensive in Switzerland - but the government of Cristina Kirchner, obviously, did not appoint a lawyer to represent the interests of the Argentine state in Switzerland.
With the change of government in 2015, Báez's bad luck
worsened
.
Thanks to the contacts of the Financial Information Unit (FIU) led by Mariano Federici and María Eugenia Talerico and the requests of Judge Sebastián Casanello,
the Swiss justice officially confirmed all these data
that were used in the sentence this Wednesday.
Based on the work of Campagnoli and after the case passed to the Federal Justice, the prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan, the prosecutor Abel Córdoba, and his assistant Juan Manuel Gaset had requested, last year, a sentence
of twelve years
in prison for Lazaro Baez,
In addition, they claimed
a fine of 2,121 million pesos
.
Fines for laundering issues can be up to
ten times
the value of bleached silver.
Trial prosecutors also requested
nine years in prison for Martin Báez
;
eight for Daniel Pérez Gadín and Jorge Chueco;
and
five
for Leonardo Fariña, who as a result of his collaboration in the cause, three of the eight that would have corresponded to him were reduced.
All of them were considered co-perpetrators "of the crime of
money laundering aggravated by having been committed regularly
and by having been perpetrated by members of a gang for the continued commission of the facts."
The prosecution also requested the following prison sentences for the crime of money laundering: six years for Juan Alberto De Rasi and Julio Mendoza;
five years for Fabian Rossi (the ex-husband of Iliana Calabró)
, Cesar Fernández, Leandro Báez, Eduardo Castro and Walter Zansot.
The prosecutor also
requested four years and six months for Federico Elaskar
, Martín Andrés Eraso, Claudio Bustos, Luciana Báez, Melina Báez and Carlos Molinari.
Meanwhile, for Daniel Byn, the prosecutors required a suspended three-year prison sentence.
Córdoba and Gaset requested to impose fines for the defendants and required that assets obtained through illegal activities be confiscated, including
cash, rooms, real estate and vehicles.
On the other hand, they requested
the acquittal
of eight defendants: Cristian Delli Quadri, Juan Ignacio Pisano Costa, Sebastián Pérez Gadín, Jorge Norberto Cerrotta, Santiago Carradori, Eduardo Larrea and Alejandro Ons Costa.
The trial prosecutors explained that throughout the investigation "
international structures have been identified
without commercial, fiscal and legal advantages and operations related to assets that do not fit the profile of real companies."
In his allegation, Córdoba pointed out that the accumulated evidence expresses "
an unprecedented forcefulness for this type of crimes
" and that "there are no doubts about the illegal ones, based on the bank documents accredited with transnational deployment."
In this sense, the prosecution considered that "
the crimes preceding money laundering - fraud in public works and tax evasion
-, as they had been described in the request for a trial, were credited with the sufficiency required by an investigation of these characteristics".
This position of the prosecution complicates Vice President Cristina Kirchner in the highway case.
Along these lines, the MPF representative pointed to "Báez as the
head
of the criminal organization."
Among the indicators that point to Báez, he listed “the possession of assets
not included in the tax affidavit,
the placing of family members as beneficiaries in offshore companies, cash movements outside the financial market, inconsistent explanations, non-transparent or unidentifiable providers, lack of documentation and financial informality ”.
The Córdoba prosecutor pointed out that at the beginning of the trial the defendants denied “the screen companies”, but with the progress of the presentation of evidence
“they admitted the existence of the black funds”
of Cristina Kirchner's business partner.