The Presidency of the Republic does not have records of the visits received by Alejandro Astesiano, the former head of the presidential custody of Luis Lacalle Pou, in his Executive Tower fourth floor officeaccording to the response to a request for access to information made by The Observer.
“There are no records of people who visited the Executive Tower to meet with Mr. Alejandro Astesiano”, assures the writing and adds that the “full list of income to said building was forwarded to the 12th shift Criminal Prosecutor’s Officeand therefore is found reached by reservation”.
The Flagrancia prosecutor, Gabriela Fossati – who is carrying out the investigation – asked the Presidency to register visits to the building which serves as the seat of government.
astesiano was arrested on September 25, shortly after landing in Uruguay from Costa Rica, a country to which he had traveled with Luis Lacalle Pou and his three children.
In a hearing held hours after her arrest, the prosecutor assured that Astesiano organized meetings in his office on the 4th floor with his accomplicesthe notary Álvaro Fernández and the Russian Alexey Slivaevboth also accused in the framework of the case that investigates the falsification of documents for Russians and Ukrainians to access Uruguayan passports.
According to what the prosecutor recounted at the end of September, most of the time Astesiano met alone with Fernández, although once Slivaev also joined.
In mid-October, meanwhile, Fossati inspected the former chief custodian’s office in the Executive Tower. From there he took several documents.
In addition to meeting with his accomplices in the Executive Tower, the Prosecutor’s Office investigates the use that Astesiano made of the surveillance cameras of the Ministry of the Interiorwhich also have a base in the Presidency of the Republic, from where you can access the images.
as he learned The Observer, in Astesiano’s office they located information that supports the hypothesis that he used them for personal purposes, including several illegal businesses that he had. The custodian used to go to the division of the Executive Tower where the node was and asked the visualizers to show him certain points of the city that had nothing to do with his work as a custodian.
Security measures
As a result of this case, President Luis Lacalle Pou resolved to increase security measures in the Executive Tower. “Because of people who act pathologically, controls must be extreme,” said the president at the beginning of October, after being consulted about the security measures at the government headquarters.
A few days later, a meeting of the Council of Ministers was held in which the participants were required to go through the scanner on the ground floor, one of the measures derived from the scandal caused by the arrest of the custodian.
