Máximo Kirchner’s Offices Raided in Hotesur Corruption Case

Máximo Kirchner’s Offices Raided in Hotesur Corruption Case

Post date : 07.16.2015 3:22 pm

Bad News Coincides with Release of Latest Poverty Statistics

Argentine federal judge Claudio Bonadio and prosecutor Carlos Stornelliordered a raid on the offices of Presidential son and La Cámpora leader, Máximo Kirchner, Monday, seeking accounting information as part of the ongoing Hotesur K-money laundering and corruption case.

Máximo Kirchner was not present during the raid on Idea SA (which belongs to him) and Valle Mitre; both companies are administrators of the hotels owned by President Cristina Fernández, who was traveling at the time.

All reports indicate that the Kirchner family and its associates were not expecting these developments; Clarin reports that “her [Kirchner’s] family showed signs of nervousness about the proceedings…”

For example in El Calafate, when the police arrived sent by Bonadio to the Hotel Los Sauces, city prosecutor Natalia Mercado approached. She is the daughter of Alicia Kirchner, the president’s niece, cousin of Máximo and sister to Romina Mercado, president of Hotesur. She tried to impose a gesture of authority, but federal officials explained to her that she had nothing she could do there.

It was, for certain, a precedent-setting event:

Never in the twelve years of K-power has the Federal Court come to ring the door bell at the house on Avenida Néstor Carlos Kirchner, number 496, Rio Gallegos: it is the operational center of some of the most important business of the presidential family, and its partners.

The raid itself represented the execution of Judge Bonadio’s “procedural orders” seeking information about 35 separate companies with ties to the Kirchner family and its business interests, specifically including “banks and companies” associated with K-businessman Lázaro Báez – the number one recipient of public works contracts during the Kirchner administration. Báez is a business partner of President Kirchner, and the former administrator of her largest hotel, Alto Calafate.

Argentina’s creditors have undertaken a great effort to reveal the extent of corruption by Báez and other Kirchner confidantes. Earlier this summer in Nevada, Judge Cam Ferenbach rejected a petition by Mossack Fonseca’s alter ego M.F. Corporate Services to stay discovery. In Nevada and in Bonadio’s court, the tide is turning against corruption.

Unsurprisingly, K-confidantes were quick to publicly undermine the raid, with Kirchner’s Cabinet Chief, Aníbal Fernández, calling it “inconceivable,” and then assailing the action on a semantic level, claiming, this “is not a raid, but an information inquiry.”

Presidential cronies will have an equally difficult time refuting just-released evidence that the government’s global isolation as a result of its inability to settle with its creditors is crushing the Argentine economy: the Argentine Catholic University released a report yesterday that the Argentine poverty level has increased to 28.7%. That means 11.5 million Argentines are living below the poverty level.

This is in marked contrast to the figures cited by President Kirchner last month, when she “sparked controversy” by endorsing “widely disputed government figures,” and claiming that the poverty rate was “below five percent.”

We’ve long documented the Kirchner administration’s discomfort with hard economic data (it simply stopped publishing poverty statistics in 2013), but we continue to be baffled by its recalcitrant attitude towards negotiating a solution to its debt. Relief for the Argentine people would soon follow.