Lawyer Valeria Carreras expanded the complaint for “treason against the country” against former president Mauricio Macri for the agreement by which Argentina undertook to “remove all obstacles that limit economic growth” of the Malvinas Islands, after the revelations about the understanding known this Tuesday from the testimony of the former British foreign minister in charge of the negotiations.
“I expanded the complaint because there is a new fact in this aberrant agreement that could not be signed even drunk,” said the lawyer in statements to Radio 10, in which she referred to the memoirs of former UK Foreign Minister Alan Duncan, who said that then Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Foradori “was drunk” when he signed an agreement to lift Argentine sanctions on British companies operating in the waters surrounding the Falklands.
As revealed by the Declassified site, in that agreement, reached in September 2016, Concessions were granted by Argentina for flight frequencies that would arrive at the islands from different points of the continent with a stopover in Argentina.
The details of the agreement
According to Duncan, the deal was closed in a warehouse owned by the British Embassy in Buenos Aires, on whose walls several bottles of merlot wine rested, and that a meeting with Foradori was held on that stage, on behalf of the government headed by Macri.
“As bottle after bottle passed from the cellar wall to the table, the negotiations improved. At around 2 in the morning we shook hands with a general agreement,” said the former British foreign minister.
“As bottle after bottle passed from the cellar wall to the table, the negotiations improved. At around 2 in the morning we shook hands with an overall agreement”Alan Duncan, former British Foreign Minister
The next day, September 13, Duncan said that Mark Kent (then the UK ambassador) “told him that Foradori had phoned him to say that he was “so drunk last night he couldn’t remember all the details” of that deal that had signed.
“Like a true Brit, Mark reminded him of what he had agreed to, faithfully and without embellishment. So I think we’re on the right track,” Duncan said.
And he added: “At the meeting of the Investment Forum of Argentina (held on those days in Buenos Aires) I had a brief meeting with President Macri, who gave his blessing to our efforts.”
For Carreras, this fact makes the signing of an agreement that was detrimental to Argentina’s claim to sovereignty over the Malvinas more serious, and he recalled that the signing of that understanding “was ordered” by Macri.
“Macri gave Theresa May (then British Prime Minister) everything she had asked for. It was crazy to give flight frequencies to the Malvinas, where not only could Argentines not work, but those permits were given so that those who were usurping the territory came and went, at a time when a military base was being set up,” added Carreras.
The lawyer, who also represents the majority complaint that the relatives of the ARA San Juan sailors follow in a case for illegal espionage, presented in 2019 a complaint for “treason against the country” against Macri and several officials of his governmentwhich was left in charge of federal prosecutor Jorge Di Lello, who charged the former president.
Based on these revelations, the lawyer decided to present an extension, in a case that is currently being processed by the Ramiro González prosecutor’s office.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero arranged to initiate an internal investigation to determine the veracity of the expressions made by Duncan to determine “possible breaches of the duties of a public official and of the provisions established in the organic law of the Foreign Service of the Nation No. 20957 in the signing of the agreement “during the management of Susana Malcorra as chancellor of the Macri administration”` .
