One of the brothers of former President Mauricio Macri will testify this Monday as a witness, in the case in which alleged illegal espionage maneuvers are being investigated against political, union, social leaders, journalists and people deprived of their liberty during the Cambiemos government.
This is Mariano Macri, who is far from the former president and in a recently published book he assured that his brother “liked the toy”, in relation to illegal espionage and illicit mechanisms for intercepting telephone calls.
Mariano Macri was summoned by federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi for this Monday at 3:00 p.m. and it is expected that the statement, which should have been postponed once for health reasons, will be carried out through the virtual zoom platform.
The testimony of the former president’s brother, who will be sworn to tell the truth, was requested by different plaintiffs after the book “Hermano” by journalist Santiago O’Donnell was published, in which Mariano Macri affirms that his family engaged in maneuvers of illegal espionage and that Macri made a habit of this activity.
“It started with the old man (Franco Macri) worried about Sandra’s husband (sister of the former president), but later it seems that Mauricio liked the toy, because they had the problem of eavesdropping,” Mariano Macri said in one of the passages of the O’Donnell’s book, in which he refers to the case for illegal wiretapping for which his brother was prosecuted when he was head of the Buenos Aires government.
According to the book, Mariano Macri was in charge of telling Mauricio that their father had sent Néstor Leonardo, then Sandra Macri’s partner, whom he mistrusted, to listen.
“I told Mauricio that dad wanted to set up a hearing because he did not know if the physical integrity of Sandra and the boys was in danger. Mauricio must have talked about it with the general manager of the group, Leo Maffioli,” said the brother of the former president in one of the interviews reproduced in the book published by Editorial Sudamericana.
“The one who used the toy was Mauricio, it is clear from the quilombos that arose later. For my old man, the only gateway to that esoteric world of espionage started in Mauricio’s kidnapping, but there it stayed,” Mariano Macri said, according to comes from the cited book.
“Mauricio always wanted to show that he had it longer. From a brother president I would have expected him to suppress the intelligence services, which only cause harm, which have nothing good to contribute to society. And that a transparent institutional path would begin. And Well, no. He wanted to bend, and he must have operated in justice, more effectively or more clumsily. Justice itself was placed at his service. He must have operated with the intelligence services. For a reason he put a friend of the Black’s ilk [Arribas]that no matter how much affection he has for him, he is a very shady guy: to continue with the listening, the monitoring, the folders,” he asserted.
Mariano Macri’s statement was ordered by Judge Martínez de Giorgi in a resolution in which he also ordered the testimony of the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) intervener, Cristina Caamaño, and deputy Diego Santilli, who will testify for written.
The citations were ordered together with more than 40 pieces of evidence ordered by the magistrate when he was in charge of the investigation after the transfer of the federal jurisdiction from Lomas de Zamora to Comodoro Py by order of the Federal Court of Cassation.
The former heads of the AFI in the macrismo, Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani, along with other former officials and former agents of the agency, were prosecuted in the case.
However, when the case went to the Courts of Comodoro Py, at the request of the defenses of the accused former officials, the Federal Chamber of Buenos Aires reviewed the resolution in Lomas de Zamora and concluded that there was no illicit association in the AFI but that it was of the illegal “self-employed” actions of a group of spies.
For the Federal Chamber of Buenos Aires there was no violation of the intelligence law by the former directors of the AFI, for which they benefited from a lack of merit, although Majdalani was prosecuted for alleged “failure to fulfill duties” as a result of not having controlled the activities of the agents who called themselves the “Super Mario Bros.”
