Three journalists received intimidating messages last month
to stop talking about the "Lord of Tobacco", Pablo Otero
, just when the government is considering changing the tax scheme, because Tabacalera Sarandí judicially challenged the current regulations and pays less taxes than the main companies in the sector. sector.
These three injunctions are similar to the one received two years ago by
Diego Cabot, a journalist from La Nación
, according to what Clarín was able to reconstruct.
The last one to receive a document letter was journalist
Andrés Sanguinetti
, from the iProfesional news portal, who was ordered to delete a note and retract it, under threat of initiating civil and criminal actions, as Clarín published last week.
But now it was learned that journalists
Marcelo Longobardi
also received similar injunctions for their participation in his program on Radio Rivadavia; and
Camila Dolabjian
and
Diego Cabot
, for articles they wrote in La Nación.
Last month, Longobardi was sent a document letter
by lawyer Gabriel Palmeiro, partner of the powerful law firm of Maximiliano Rusconi.
There they ordered him "to immediately desist from continuing with the explicit or subliminal formulation of information lacking any truth in relation to Mr. Otero," the journalist said in Rivadavia. And he added that they asked him "within 24 hours" to "retract false, offensive and harassing expressions" against Otero and his company.
Longobardi stated that his journalistic participation in this situation was limited to
asking Minister Guillermo Francos and Deputy Cristian Ritondo about Otero and Tabacalera Sarandí
, since the tax change for the tobacco sector was an issue that was being discussed in the omnibus bill. that the Government sent to the Chamber of Deputies.
The journalist highlighted that "Rusconi is known as a criminal lawyer in his capacity as defender of
Cristina Kirchner, Julio De Vid
or, of the dark Mr.
Lagomarsino
, the one with Nisman's gun, and even of
Nicolás Maduro
, in the case of the glassy plane affair of the Iranians and Venezuelans".
Longobardi said that
"Dr. Rusconi's threats, his ridiculous intimidating letter,
do not change anything for me, because I have experience in having suffered firsthand from some gangsters. Due to the tone of the letter, it brought back some remnants of those moments of Mr. Yabrán. , from the Buenos Aires police (when he suffered an attack on his house), from Mr. (Cristóbal) López or from the Kirchners, so don't screw with me," he concluded his comment on the subject on his radio program.
The representative of Tabacalera Sarandí also ordered
Diego Cabot to "rectify" the content of one of his notes,
"under warning of taking legal action for the damages caused because the good commercial name of my client had been affected."
The article published by Cabot was a little more than two years ago in the newspaper La Nación and was titled "AFIP: won a lawsuit to claim millions from a tobacco company, but for now it is not paid."
More recent is the case of Camila Dolabjian, who this year wrote several articles in La Nación about the Tobacco Lord lobby. One was: "The war between tobacco companies that hides behind an article in the omnibus law."
And the last note where Dolabjian mentioned it to Otero was when he wrote that
"Tabacalera Sarandí managed to prevent the modifications to the internal tax on cigarettes from advancing
that would have left it on equal tax footing with the large international players," in his note about " "Sectors, companies and provinces that played strongly in the lobby for the omnibus law."
Otero's response, as Clarín was able to reconstruct, was to write
three emails to Dolabjian this year from his personal email box, with intimidating messages,
in which he also commented on alleged demands made by him against other journalists, as a warning.
FOPEA against threats of legal action
The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) expressed its solidarity with the journalist
Andrés Sanguinetti,
after he received a document letter from the partner of Maximiliano Rusconi's studio, "intimating" him to "immediately remove the note from the Internet and social networks." "A 'dubious' tobacco company already handles 45% of the local cigarette market," which he published on a news portal on March 12.
"FOPEA reiterates that threats of legal action have an inhibiting effect not only on the recipient but on journalism in general, which
deteriorates the quality of the information that society receives
. "
"Any citizen, but even more so political, social, union and business leaders, have the possibility of responding and clarifying whether a publication is erroneous or confusing
without having to resort to resources from other types of conflicts and outside the field of information. as a social good
", stated FOPEA.
The tobacco industry is revolutionized by the growth of Tabacalera Sarandí
, a Buenos Aires SME owned by Argentine businessman Otero, which in the last eight years managed to go
from 5% of the market to more than 30%
, according to specialist estimates, displacing traditional international companies, thanks to the fact that they would be under-invoicing the price of their cigarette packages before the AFIP and that they obtained
judicial precautionary measures that allow them to pay less taxes
and sell their products much cheaper than their competitors. Otero also accumulated proverbial lobbying power, which includes a political leg, a judicial leg, and a media leg.
According to a report by the consulting firm Abeceb, from last January, this type of practices by Otero's company and other much smaller tobacco companies, but that act in the same way, allowed them to increase their participation in the cigarette market, by passing from 5.6% of the total in 2016, to 38.4% in 2023, generating
an "accumulated collection loss of US$ 5,823 million, between the years 2018 and 2023
" for the national State.
But if Otero's company pays much less in taxes, then its prices drop, revenue for the State and the provinces falls, competition becomes unbalanced and cigarette consumption increases, generating
a problem not only tax but also public health. ,
since tobacco consumption kills 45,000 people per year in Argentina, 14% of the total deaths, according to a report by the UBA University Hospitals Network.
Furthermore, this tax distortion led by Tabacalera Sarandí caused that, between 2018 and 2023
, cigarette consumption had an interannual increase of 1.2% in Argentina
, while the world average decreased cigarette consumption by 2% each year, according to the Abeceb report.