Corruption scandal swirls around Argentine leader
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has rejected newspaper allegations that she and he late husband profited from connections to businessman Lazaro Baez
New corruption allegations are swirling around the Argentine president, who ordered her personal secretary to read a blistering statement on Tuesday accusing the nation’s leading newspapers of lying and defaming her “in the best style of fascism”.
The scandal centres on Lazaro Baez, an old friend and business partner of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her late husband, president Nestor Kirchner. Austral Construcciones and other Baez companies have won many public works contracts during the Kirchners’ decade in office.
The presidential couple’s declared wealth has grown more than tenfold since they began leading Argentina, gains they attributed to lucky moves in real estate and the profits from several luxury hotels they own in Patagonia.
Now a series of investigative reports by the newspaper La Nacion suggests that Baez may have funnelled taxpayer’s money from his contracts back to the Kirchners in the form of “rent” payments for rooms at the couple’s hotels.
According to La Nacion, the official books of companies owned by Baez show they spent millions of dollars to reserve a third of the Kirchners’ hotel rooms, whether the rooms were used or not. The paper also said the money-losing state-controlled airline Aerolineas Argentinas guaranteed another third of the rooms, providing a steady flow of profits to the couple’s private businesses.
The presidential secretary, Oscar Parilli, went on live television to attack the story.
“The false reports by the daily La Nacion, later repeated incessantly once again by Clarin ... try to put in doubt the legitimacy, legality and honesty of the private economic acts of the Presidents Nestor Carlos Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner,” Parilli said.
