Hear
Justice already has in its hands at least four files in which it investigates alleged irregularities in the distribution of food to canteens by the Ministry of Human Capitalfraud and extortion maneuvers by picketers against beneficiaries of social plans and irregular hiring in the minority area of the portfolio that is under the orbit of Sandra Pettovello.
The Government is the complainant in two of the cases and the defendant or defendant in the other two. The files were expedited a month ago, on May 13, when more than 20 houses and cooperatives of piquetero leaders were raided, but since then Human Capital has been the subject of questions for inefficiency, malpractice and sloppiness.
The first case that has the Government as a complainant began with anonymous calls received on a line of the Ministry of Security, opened by Patricia Bullrich, to receive complaints from people who were forced to attend the marches to assign them social plans. More than 10,000 calls have been received since the end of last year. Of those, there were about seven identified people who were willing to testify to explain the maneuvers of which they were victims. Thus, prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita and judge Sebastián Casanello advanced on those cases.
They discovered that it was common practice for beneficiaries of the Potenciar Trabajo Plan who did not go to the Polo Obrero marches to be punished, they were prevented from going to the community kitchen, or they were not allowed to sell food they received from the State. It was discovered that there were several strata of piquetero leaders, ranging from aspiring planeros to those who received more than one social plan.
The WhatsApp messages from the leaders to the beneficiaries, pressuring them and preventing them from accessing the benefits, are evidence of these practices that reach leaders of the Polo Obrero, Frente de Organization en Lucha (FOL) and Barrios de Pie. But Justice went further and also found evidence of diversion of funds, which implies the crime of fraud. Of the 113 million pesos received by the Polo Obrero from the former Ministry of Social Development, 25 million pesos were diverted to the Rumbos printing press and the company Coxtex SA.
This last firm was identified as a company created exclusively to generate false invoices. This company issued apocryphal receipts for $5 million in favor of the Polo Obrero, which, according to the investigation, were hidden in three other ghost companies.
The Rumbos printing press, which received $20 million from the Polo Obrero, is also being investigated. The National Electoral Chamber confirmed that this printing press contributed $18 million to the electoral and institutional campaigns of the Partido Obrero between 2020 and 2023. Investigators believe that part of the diverted money financed the Partido Obrero, which competes in the elections within the Left Front.
For this reason, Judge Casanello summoned him to give an investigative statement for fraud. Eduardo Belibonithe leader of the group, upon suspicion that the fraud was to illegally finance political activity.
The judge summoned Dina Patricia Iramain, Brisa Noelia Paucara Choque, Elizabeth Galindo Mamani and Cynthia Delgado Vilches for June 11; to Gloria Paraguay Estrada, Rossmery Grande Arancibia, Mercedes Fossat and María Cecilia Cowper for June 12; to Carlos Fernández Kostiuk, Manuel Alonso and Lorenzo Martelli for June 13; to Jeremías Cantero, Gianna Puppo, Iván Ezequiel Candotti and Gustavo Guillermo Vásquez for June 18 and Mariano Alejandro Centanni, Erika Lubenfeld, Ezequiel Coego and Elizabeth del Carmen Palma for June 19. The round ends with the summons to Eduardo Silvio Belliboni, María Isolda Dotti, Iván Ortiz and Roberto Adrián Albornoz for June 25.
In parallel to this scandal, another one broke out that this time put the Ministry of Human Capital not as a complainant, but as a defendant. The social leader Juan Grabois He denounced that the Government was withholding the food that was intended to be distributed among the soup kitchens.
Judge Casanello also intervened, but delegated the case to prosecutor Paloma Ochoa. The prosecutor ruled in a precautionary measure that the judge should order the Government to deliver the food it had stored in two warehouses in Villa Martelli and Tafi Viejo, Tucumán.
But Casanello rejected the prosecutor’s request and instead ordered the Government to present a plan for the distribution of this food gradually, to report the complete stock of accumulated food and to provide the records of each of the purchases. The Ministry of Human Capital was outraged. He ignored the court order and appealed it.
After a scandalous hearing in the Federal Chamber, where the ministry’s lawyer Leila Gianni shouted at Grabois, the court decided to agree with Casanello and forced the Government to present the food distribution plan. Finally, the Government did so on Thursday night and arranged to distribute the milk and the rest of the food in low-income schools and through the Conin Foundation network.
In her writing she said that Justice forced her to distribute that food that she indicated she had bought to face catastrophes. Which seems contradictory since they were about to win.
To all this, the investigation by prosecutor Ochoa and the inspection that Casanello ordered in the warehouses allowed us to establish that there was powdered milk that expired next month, and that there were shortages, and inconsistencies between what the Government declared in stock and what there was actually in the warehouses.
In addition to this non-compliance, the Government is still at fault since Casanello asked for the food purchase records, to trace each batch, but the information has not yet fully reached the courts.
In parallel, the judge in Federal Administrative Litigation Walter Lara Correa ruled that another case initiated by the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP) against the Ministry of Human Capital be processed as a collective protection. He ordered that it be verified whether there are similar processes in the Public Registry of Collective Processes of the Supreme Court.
The fourth file is also in Comodoro Py and was initiated by the Ministry of Human Capital but it can become a boomerang and from a complainant it can end up being a defendant. This case was opened by Sandra Pettovello’s portfolio when criticism was intensifying over the management of her food in the community kitchens and one cause almost covered up the other.
With a letter from Leila Gianni, the ministry denounced that a former official, Pablo de la Torrewho was in charge of the Children’s Secretariat, used a mechanism for hiring employees through the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), an international entity that finances projects in various countries.
This case, which appears as a counterattack, fell in the court of Ariel Lijo. The magistrate is the Government’s candidate for the Court, so he delegated the investigation to prosecutor Ramiro Gonzalez. The official requested reports from the Government on the number of contracts, the amounts involved and ordered the legal representative of the OEI to declare.
However, the Government has not yet completed that information that the prosecutor requested to be sent urgently. The complaint mentions that these international programs, suitable for financing consultancies or training, were used to pay current salaries or bonuses, when at the beginning of the administration appointments in the State were blocked.
The complaint is based on the testimonies of a subordinate of De la Torre, Federico Fernandez, who, as Leila Gianni declared last Tuesday in Comodoro Py, narrated how the hiring scheme worked. But the statement of Pettovello’s legal undersecretary is still not supported by the documentary evidence that the prosecutor requested.
The prosecutor summoned a testimonial statement for this week from the Undersecretary of Administrative Management in the Secretariat of Children, Adolescence and Family, Alejandro Schiavi, and the legal representative of the Ibero-American State Organization. The evidence continues to be gathered, but no one is betting that the case will end in De la Torre.
