-“Why was she transferred?” asked the prosecutor.
-“I had no explanation,” responded the woman, an employee of the then AFIP.
-“Did it imply a setback in your career?” the prosecutor asked.
-“For me… yes,” answered the woman, full of doubts.
The exchange occurred this Thursday, between the prosecutor of the Cuadernos de las Bribes trial, Fabiana Leonand Veronica Iglesiasone of the employees of the collection agency that detected accounting inconsistencies in the signatures of some of the businessmen investigated who entered into contracts with the State during the Kirchnerist governments.
Iglesias, who after that audit went from boss to adviser, is part of the group of witnesses requested by the prosecution to try to shed light on some of the alleged maneuvers designed so that businessmen such as Juan Carlos de Goycoechea, Carlos Wagner, Angelo Calcaterra or Juan Carlos Lascurain could freely dispose of the advances destined for public works.
In general terms, their companies −Isolux, Fainser, Sacde or Esuco− formed a temporary alliance with other firms (a UTE), for a specific public works project. In the case of Isolux, it was the Río Turbio Thermoelectric Plant, awarded in 2007 for more than 2,000 million pesos, a figure close to the 670 million dollars.
The firms received an advance on work or some type of partial payments from the State and then contracted the services of suppliers or subcontractors which, in ARCA’s eyes, were “untrustworthy taxpayers”: that is, suppliers who issued invoices of dubious consistency.
The employees of the current Customs Collection and Control Agency (ARCA) called to testify They detected money outflows without proven considerationwhich allowed businessmen to reflect these movements in their accounting and tax records as if they were ordinary commercial payments, linked to the work they were in charge of.
“They informed us that the money had been transferred through an intermediary in New York to the Private Bank of Andorra. That’s where our investigative work ended,” he declared, in turn, Maria Marta Criscuoloanother of the former AFIP employees who was involved in the investigations.
Criscuolo was referring to information provided to him by the Santander Río bank about Sacde, the former Iecsa SA, then in the hands of Angelo Calcaterra −cousin of former president Mauricio Macri−, and Héctor Javier Sánchez Caballero. Iecsa integrated a joint venture designed to carry out the multimillion-dollar but failed burying of the Sarmiento train.
“What we could see, through the agency’s computer databases, is that the UTE −of Iecsa− in that period had carried out operations to purchase dollars for holding. We circulated it to the company and they informed us that the dollars had been delivered to representatives of the UTE in cash,” said Criscuolo. “I think I had acquired three million dollars. I don’t remember if there had been two or three money purchase operations for holding,” he added.
Like Iglesias, accountant Criscuolo “lost her position” as a supervisor, according to what she said at the hearing, in 2020, when she began to prepare summaries. “They didn’t give me the reasons,” he told prosecutor León.
The European route
Andorra is a destination with its own weight in the Cuadernos file. The deceased former secretary of Néstor Kirchner Daniel Muñozowner of a fortune that he used to purchase luxurious properties in the country, in New York and the Caribbean, created a corporate structure in Andorra, as he was able to reconstruct the Financial Information Unit (UIF)plaintiff in the case and represented by Mariano Galpern.
It was proven, for example, that in September 2013, from an account in the Private Bank of Andorra in the name of Todisco, a transfer of 1,000,000 dollars was made to an account of a law firm in Miami. That money was then used to purchase an apartment in the exclusive Turnberry Ocean building.
