The judges, prosecutors, Buenos Aires government officials, directors of Grupo Clarín and former intelligence agents who participated in the private flight and the VIP stay in Lago Escondido “should be summoned to make an investigative statement and prosecuted,” the complainant lawyer Marcelo Hertzriken Velasco told Télam. .
He referred to the judges like this Julián Ercolini, Carlos Mahiques, Pablo Yadarola and Pablo Cayssials; to the attorney general of CABA, Juan Bautista Mahiques; to the Buenos Aires Minister of Security and Justice, Marcelo D’Alessandro; to the former agent of the AFI Leonardo Bergroth; businessman Thomas Reinke and the directors of Grupo Clarín Pablo Casey and Jorge Rendowho are accused in the case “Ercolini et al. s/breach of duties as a public official and acceptance of gifts”.
The file is processed in the Federal Court of Bariloche in charge of the substitute judge Silvina Domínguez, where the case began based on the complaint filed by Hertzriken Velasco on October 24.
The lawyer from the city of General Roca, in the Alto Valle region of Rio Negro, based his presentation on the publication published by the Página/12 newspaper on October 17, in which he reported for the first time about a trip made to Bariloche on Thursday, October 13, by a group of judges, prosecutors and government officials from Buenos Aires who arrived on a private plane from the Flyzar company.
Judge Domínguez did not accept Hertzriken Velasco as a plaintiff in the case, a decision that the lawyer appealed before the Federal Chamber of General Roca.
“Let’s hope it resolves before the fair (judicial of the month of January),” said the lawyer in dialogue with this agency.
Referring to the four judges involved in the scandal, Ercolini, Mahiques, Yadarola and Cayssials, the complainant lawyer claimed that the Magistracy Council “separate them from their positions” so that they are summoned for investigation and “processed”.
“It is impossible to think that any Argentine citizen is tried by these people”stressed the legal implications that the trip and the stay in Lago Escondido should have in the cases in which these magistrates intervene, such as Ercolini and Mahiques -to cite one case- in the illegal espionage of the relatives of the crew members of the ARA San Juan.
Furthermore, he said that Minister D’Alessandro, the directors of Clarín Rendo and Casey, the businessman Reinke, and the administrator of Lago Escondido Van Ditmar should be “arrested” to “prevent them from hindering the progress of the file.”
This approach became known in recent years as “Irurzun doctrine”by attributing to the judge of the Federal Chamber Martín Irurzun the thesis that certain people -due to their relationships, due to an alleged ‘residual power’- have the capacity to prevent or block the action of justice.
In this sense, Hertzriken Velasco warned that in the chats that the private flight passengers sent through the Telegram application “it was demonstrated” that those involved in the VIP trip “intend to organize a defense strategy that hides the granting and acceptance of gifts.
The case over Lago Escondido
On the other hand, the lawyer recalled that one of the defendants, Carlos Mahiques, was precisely the judge who wrote the governing vote of the ruling that closed, due to the statute of limitations, the case that investigated the fraudulent purchase of the lands of the Hidden Lake company (Lago Escondido).
On September 15, 2021, the Federal Criminal Cassation Chamber, with the signature of Mahiques, Guillermo Yacobucci and Liliana Catucci, rejected the appeal filed by the head of the Attorney General’s Office before the Federal Criminal and Correctional Chamber, José Luis Agüero Iturbe, and thus ratified the prescription of the file and the dismissal of all those involved, including public officials and Charles Barrington Lewis, son of English magnate Joe Lewis.
The case began in 2010 as a result of a complaint filed by the Administrative Investigations Office and involved the process of purchasing two lots for a total of almost 11,000 hectares that surround Lake Escondido.
The investigation allowed to determine that On June 19, 1996, the firm “HR Properties Bs As” -with majority shares in the hands of Argentines- requested authorization from the National Security Zone Commission for the acquisition of 8,063 hectares in the area of El Foyel, Río Negro. and near the lake.
The company then added another 2,760 hectares: the lands are located in a border security area, so they are protected by a special regime derived from Decree Law 15,385/44 and Law 12,913 that determine that lands in bordering areas and security cannot be in foreign hands.
A few months after obtaining authorization from the National Security Zone Commission to proceed with the purchase, the firm “HR Properties Bs As” became “Hidden Lake SA”, with Charles Lewis as the main shareholder and under that name registered in his favor the lands in the Real Estate Registry of the province of Río Negro.
Initially, they were defendants Charles Lewis and former national and Río Negro province officialsas the acting notary public and the holder of the Real Property Registry of Río Negro.
Since 2010 the case progressed slowly, adding some testimonies and evidence, until the former Treasury Attorney Carlos Balbín -during the beginning of the administration of former President Mauricio Macri- gave impetus to the investigation.
This action sealed the fate of the official: he was replaced by Bernardo Saravia Frías, who stopped the judicial questioning of the sale of the land.
The passage of time played in favor of the defendants.
In 2019, Federal Court 6 issued the first statute of limitations for the crime investigated.
Despite the attempts of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which appealed on three occasions the closure of the file due to prescription, the die was definitively cast in September 2021 when Mahiques -former Minister of Justice of the province of Buenos Aires during the management of María Eugenia Vidal- signed the governing vote of the ruling of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation.
The “huemules”
Mahiques was one of the “huemules” who traveled to Bariloche and the Lago Escondido ranch on October 13, presumably invited by Grupo Clarín.
What “huemules” (deer from southern Patagonia, an endangered species) the participants of the VIP trip called themselvesaccording to the leaked messages that were later disseminated in different newspaper articles by El Cohete a la luna, Tiempo Argentino and Perfil.
In the complaint request for this luxury excursion, the federal prosecutor of Bariloche María Cándida Etchepare emphasized the “clear discrepancy” between the dates of accommodation of those involved and that of the invoices presented by Van Ditmar, the administrator of Lago Escondido .
The prosecutor aims to determine if the crime of acceptance of gifts by magistrates and public officials who would have been invited by Grupo Clarín.
Etchepare also received invoices issued by the company Servicios y Emprendimientos Aeronáuticos SA -the air transport company whose fanciful name is Flyzar-, owner of the plane in which Ercolini, Bergroth, Reinke, Juan Bautista Mahiques, D’Alesandro, traveled to Bariloche, Carlos Mahiques, Yadarola and Cayssials.
The firm presented invoices “many of them dated October 13 for the sum of 120,000 pesos, with the exception of those corresponding to Bergroth, dated the 17th and 19th of the same month, for the sum of 120,000 and 60,000 pesos, respectively.” , according to the imputation request signed by the prosecutor.
