Daniel Santoro
02/27/2021 23:00
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 02/27/2021 11:00 PM
A few hours after watching on a 32-inch TV the reading of the sentence of Lázaro Báez and eight years after the judicial investigation of the Ruta del Dinero K began, José María Campagnoli (60 years old) said that before the offensive K Against Justice "many judges and prosecutors
are paying too high a cost
to try to impose justice."
Campagnoli recalled with anguish when in 2013 the former head of prosecutors, Alejandra Gils Carbó, during the second presidency of Cristina Kirchner, suspended him and subjected him to impeachment for having opened the first case to investigate the owner's laundering maneuvers of Austral Construcciones.
He recalled the unprecedented mobilizations of civil society in his favor that frustrated the impeachment trial and in an interview with
Clarín he
recounted anecdotes from the case of Báez, Cristina's business partner, and gave basic definitions:
- Doctor what did you feel when you learned on Wednesday of the 12-year prison sentence of businessman Lázaro Báez on the Route of Money K that you began to investigate in 2013 and cost you a political trial and other forms of persecution?
- I suffered a political trial mounted on lies and fallacies and my employees suffered persecution in the field which included the eviction of my prosecutor's office and the transfer to unworthy places.
Today at 8 years these things seem distant but at that time they were very hard and absolutely unfair.
The realization of Justice that conviction implies comes to my mind.
From the strength of the evidence that was collected, I imagined there was going to be a conviction.
12 years seems like an appropriate sentence.
- Does the fine of 480 million dollars applied by the federal oral court 4 (TOF 4) seem like an example for the Argentine financial sector in a country where the black economy reaches more than 40 percent?
- I think this fine is very important from a legal and also social point of view.
When you walk down the street, many ordinary people recognize me and ask to "give back the money."
Perhaps this is the most interesting part of the sentence because it opens up the possibility that those money washed or stolen will be returned in excess.
- The execution of the sentence will be, it is estimated, within a year or a year and a half because now there is an appeal process before the Chamber of Cassation and the Court. Do these remedies appear adequate in the hands of convicted persons?
- Yes, it is a long procedural path.
We Argentines should study the procedural system that we have.
I think it's very good that there is a review of court sentences.
But the truth is that when a prosecutor starts an investigation, it is like a goose game where you go back and forth.
It is an obstacle course to reach a sentence.
It is the system we have, we may like it or not but we must respect it.
What bothers is that when a conviction is reached, it is marked as lawfare.
- With these six articles of the Criminal Procedure Code that senators K brought forward their validity at the beginning of the month, do the prosecutor and the defense attorneys have the same weapons?
- To my liking there is too much game for the defense, I represent the prosecution.
I feel that the defense has infinite paths in this process that make it quite difficult to reach a final judgment.
Before there was talk of the double conformable of a sentence that was sufficient.
In other words, three judges of an oral court condemn and Cassation confirms.
Now with these articles of the new criminal procedure code another instance of review appears that adds doubts and that is the story of never ending.
They are eternal processes that discourage society that wants, once and for all, to see that something is firm and ready to execute.
- President Alberto Fernández said that the decision of the former Minister of Health Ginés Gonzalez García to have given vaccinations in a privileged way to Horacio Verbitsky and other friends of power "does not constitute a crime." Do you share the criteria?
- The vaccine scandal is pathetic to me.
People had a very bad time in quarantine, lost their jobs, were crammed into studio apartments.
It is a mockery of society.
Here it does not seem that there were errors, this is not the cinema line.
They give vaccines to someone who does not belong and they deny it to those who do.
If an official gives a different destination to a public good that was entrusted to him for another destination, we may be before the commission of a crime.
I think it is disgusting that after a quarantine that made things very difficult for all Argentines and that did not prevent the more than 50,000 deaths that we already count today, today we are talking about the fact that the Ministry of Health distributed the vaccines of the personnel of health among officials and their friends.
- President Fernández compared VIP vaccines to the bad Argentine habit of sneaking into a line ...
- I do not agree that this was only "getting ahead in line to receive the vaccine" because there are no vaccines for everyone.
In any case, this would be "getting ahead in line to get the vaccine from a doctor or a retiree."
It seems to me that after a quick reaction from the president asking the minister to resign, a regrettable attitude ensued, minimizing what happened.
It seems to me that this is something that outrages people.
What the public expects is that the rulers say: “we are going to investigate what happened and we are going to make sure that it is not repeated and that those responsible are left outside the State, at the disposal of the Justice
- Returning to the case of Ruta del Dinero K. One of the first steps in your case was that Federico Elaskar appeared at your prosecutor's office denouncing threats and extortion from the environment of Lázaro Báez?
- It wasn't exactly like that.
First, we started an ex officio investigation for Jorge Lanata's TV program.
A few days later I sent the case by lot and the investigating judge declared himself incompetent.
This is what happened to federal judge Sebastián Casanello.
At the same time, in another prosecutor's office that I was in charge of, in a pile of opinions to sign, a complaint appears in which they named Elaskar.
It was a corporate conflict in the financial SGI named “La Rosadita”.
We began to investigate the papers of one of the parties to the file and we see that they coincided with Lanata's investigation.
Elaskar had publicly said that the financial La Rosadita had been taken from him.
We understood that it was an extortion case involving the firm Helvetic Services Group that he attributed to Lázaro Báez.
And it said that 55 million euros had come out.
We discovered that between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, almost € 55 million returned and came from Switzerland.
They were in the Safra bank of Switzerland, Argentine public debt bonds were bought that they settled on the Rosario stock exchange and then they were exchanged for 9 checks that were deposited in the Austral trust in the National Bank.
We concluded that behind Helvetic was Lázaro Báez and most likely the 55 million that Elaskar said that Báez took out of the country were the ones that they later repatriated.
- But the director of Helvetic Services Group is the Cordovan Néstor Ramos who is in Switzerland, a fugitive from Justice in this case ...
- This Ramos has our inquiry request from 8 years ago.
He is an Argentinean Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland.
For us he was a front man because he appeared as a proxy for the local Helvetic.
At the trial, the representative of a Swiss bank said that the ultimate beneficiaries of the main account in Switzerland were Baez and his children.
And for that account an amount of almost 59 million dollars came and went.
- You discovered that Helvetic had 148 shell companies created in Nevada, USA ...
- When some of those companies created in Nevada did business, they appeared to be managed by Aldyne of the Seychelles and Helvetic covered them.
All companies armed by Mossack & Fonseca de Panamá.
But there would also be other tax havens.
- Is this part of the investigation of the Route of Money K incomplete?
- I have not had the file for 8 years.
I do not know what happened.
But it was a clue to investigate further.
- When you in 2013 began to touch these political and financial “calluses”, is it true that lawyers linked to the SIDE appeared, walking around the court of Dr. María Gabriela Lanz and her prosecutor's office?
- It's possible.
A conglomerate of lawyers appeared.
We indicted twelve people and each had two lawyers.
And all these lawyers acted together and in some cases presented the same brief.
They acted in a coordinated manner.
Then they acted in the same way in the denunciation of my impeachment and the denunciations they made to me.
While investigating, I had to answer ridiculous questions such as that my writings had been written by Clarín.
The cause, then, had 17 bodies.
We set all of this up in 22 days in an open source job, without any break-ins, wiretaps, or arrests.
All documented.
The complaints of these lawyers were ridiculous and, at first, I paid little attention to them because I did not think that the attorney at that time, Alejandra Gils Carbó, was going to endorse them to suspend me and make a political trial.
- Doctor, was that impeachment decision made by Gils Carbó, with whom you had a good relationship or an order from Cristina Kirchner to protect Báez?
- I do not know for sure.
But everything gave the impression of a political maneuver.
I had a good relationship with Dr. Gils Carbó who had entrusted me with, for example, the Acevedo kidnapping case and from one day to the next she made a turn and began with this capricious, unjust and arbitrary persecution.
And he cut my phone.
They got into a prosecutor's investigation because he stepped on calluses that were not Gils Carbó's.
It is suggestive that she took the lead in my pursuit.
- The then prosecutor and current head of the AFI Cristina Caamaño was appointed in her place. Did you dissolve a part of your prosecution and remove Dr. Ignacio Rodríguez Varela who was part of the team of this investigation?
- First, Gils Carbó put Caamano instead of appointing the neighboring prosecutor to my prosecutor's office and with whom we replaced each other.
Caamano asked to evict officials who worked with me and relocated them to unworthy places.
One was sent to an office that girl couldn't get the Argentine flag stopped.
My team had very serious moments with, for example, judicial proceedings.
I never imagined they could do these things.
They did a witch hunt to see what they could find by rummaging through my drawers.
It was unfortunate.
Some related investigations were halted, such as, for example, the brother of former Security Minister Cecilia Rodríguez who spoke of laundering thousands of dollars from Báez, another of money laundering in the river bar.
When they suspended me, all that was fractured.
It was something very strange, painful ... I had to explain why a prosecutor investigates is like asking a doctor why he cures.
- Some of those members of the Báez environment who promoted his impeachment on Wednesday were also convicted ...
- This is how the majority of those who promoted the complaints and my impeachment are today condemned.
This condemnation puts white on black on everything that happened.
Sometimes we lose sight of how much it costs for a case like this to reach this sentencing instance.
It is good news for Argentina.
It is one of the few corruption cases in which these volumes of money were handled that came to fruition.
-
Returning to 2021, we see an offensive of Kirchnerism on Justice.
One is the bill to reform the Public Prosecutor's Office law and the other is an attack against the acting attorney Eduardo Casal?
- This onslaught began with the change in the retirement law for magistrates that went unnoticed last year.
The contribution went from 12 to 18 percent, which led judges to retire.
This came hand in hand with the intentional discredit that is made of Justice with the lawfare story.
Then the attack with the so-called Beraldi commission, the judicial reform and the transfer of Bruglia, Bertuzzi and Caselli, among other measures.
Casal is a career man, a good man, southern.
These attacks to force his resignation are part of this offensive against independent justice.
The judges and prosecutors who investigate corruption are paying quite a high cost.
- But the judicial reform project is forward and not backward and the government says it is inspired by the 2003 Béliz project that you shared ...
- The justice reform project is a waste of money in a context of misery.
It is one more attempt to colonize federal justice.
In addition to all the works measured, we are facing a perverse form of self-amnesty.
At first, I was linked to this project because I worked with Dr. Beliz, but it is a lie.
This project does not solve the problem but multiplies it by four times the number of future appointments.
In 2003, with Beliz we presented a project that had zero cost.
It was adding the investigating judges to the twelve federal judges and having 70 judges to investigate corruption.
They were judges of the ordinary justice with experience and prestige who could strengthen the federal justice.
- Does the attack you suffered in 2003 have characteristics similar to the attack suffered by the prosecutor Stornelli for the cause of the Cuadernos delas Bribes?
- It has similar characteristics.
The persecution against me and my team had to do with the attempt to discipline judges and prosecutors and to attack the accuser.
The strategy is to question the image of the researcher.
The so-called Cause of the Notebooks is a before and after in Argentine judicial history.
31 repentant declaring with his lawyer by the side and acknowledging his participation in acts of corruption was something that the power did not expect.
It is very difficult to cover.
It is very difficult for businessmen or officials to sign a repentance agreement, with their lawyer at their side, under pressure.
It's laughable.
This motivated Dr. Stornelli to try to grind it all over the place, looking for questions that have little to do with the file itself.
They wanted to try to get public opinion to have a bad opinion of the investigation.
They want to cover the sun with their hand, I insist.
They are very similar cases.
My impeachment was a stick in the wheel of the investigation of the Route of the Money K and on the other hand trying to create fear to those who investigate the power ...
- Why do you say that there are judges who act "in electoral mode"?
- It would seem that when governments change, some magistrates decide to put or take their foot off the gas in their investigations.
There are some judges who can be cowards, lazy, know little, but there are others who end up being accomplices of the accused or of power.
There is everything in the vineyard of the Lord.
- You were a prosecutor all your life, except for your time at the Beliz Ministry of Security in the Kirchner government. Do you regret that experience with prosecutor Norberto Quantín?
- I do not regret.
That time with Beliz and Quantín was important because we wanted to do many things with the security forces.
We take it very seriously.
At that time, Kirchner set a salary limit of 3,000 pesos and I earned 9,000 in the prosecution and Quantín even more.
But we went to try to contribute something good to the Republic.
Dr. Ignacio Rodríguez Varela and Dr. Pablo Lanusse accompanied us.
Now we see that many who received those low salaries, later amassed fortunes ... I believed that there was a moment of change in the country.
I went as a technical officer.
In the PEN there are things that can be done very quickly.
With Lanusse, for example, we investigated the purchases of the Churruca hospital and the head of the Federal Police resigned.
In a summary it was quick: only 14 months.
In a court case it would have been 6 or 7 years.
But then the end came because we created a huge line of internal enemies within the government and Justice.
We also try to create a Creole FBI to take power away from the Federal and the SIDE.
These issues and others like taking prosecutors to the neighborhoods made us more enemies.
They took advantage of excesses in the Buenos Aires legislature for reforms to the urban code and Kirchner asked Quantín to resign.
Beliz did not give in on that request that Quantín, an austere Republican, resign.
Then he resigned and we all left with our heads held high.
Mini-question ping pong:
- A project?
- A professional and independent federal investigative agency in the style of the American FBI.
- A leader
: Attorney General Norberto Quantín.
- A hero
: Juan Bautista Alberdi.
- A meal:
the barbecue.
- A drink
: beer.
- A society that I admire:
the Finnish.
- A memory
: Avenida de Mayo full of people demonstrating their support for me during the impeachment trial against me in June 2014.
- A pleasure
: to clarify "unsolved crimes" A dream: that my children can develop in an Argentina with strong institutions that functions as a true republic.
- A movie:
Brave Heart.
- A series
: The simulators.
-
A book:
"1984" by George Orwell.
-
A challenge:
complete the tetrathlon in Bariloche (swimming, kayaking, mountain biking and trekking) in less than the 4 hours and 11 minutes it took me the last time.
-
A soccer team
: none.
