Four former employees of the company Petrochemical Río Tercero SA (PR3) filed a criminal complaint against Veronica VaraOwner and managing director of Piero Group. The legal action was brought forward by the lawyer supporting the plaintiffs, the criminal defense lawyer Riotercer Carlos Rioswho specified that the charges concerned the alleged crimes of fraudulent administration, expropriation of the company and attempted procedural fraud.
The complaint was filed in National Criminal and Correctional Court No. 43with the intervention of the Prosecutor’s Office No. 24in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. The presentation was made in this jurisdiction because the Company is based in this jurisdiction.
The situation of the company
The Río Tercero petrochemical industry is one of the city’s three largest industries and has been in conflict with the union and laid-off employees for more than a year. The company has been since last July production stopped completelyThe factories are paralyzed while the legal battle between the company and the chemical union continues.
According to the complaint, PR3 includes a national capital group controlled by the same person, Veronica Varawho also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors.
The court statement states that the preventive insolvency of PR3 “It was not the result of an inevitable economic crisis“, but the result of conscious decisions adopted within the economic group. According to the letter, this was an intended restructuring This benefits the other companies in the group – including Piero, Suavestar and Canon – and transfers the costs of the adjustment employees and creditors of the Río Tercero petrochemical plant.
In this context, the judiciary is asked to determine whether the company is insolvent actually or allegedly causedwith the aim of ensuring that the costs are borne by third parties. From 1981 to 2024 was the The PR3 system had the central product TDI (tolylene diisocyanate)an important input for the mattress and auto parts industries, which mainly supply companies in the same group. In 2024, in an unfavorable economic and competitive environment, the company closed this production unit and began Import TDI from Chinaand argued on grounds of cost.
The complaint states that following this decision, the company “gradually deactivated, without income and driven into bankruptcy”. In October 2024, the company laid off employees about 120 workers out of a total of 375 when the TDI unit was closed. He released in July 2025 another 124 employees and a few days later it filed for preventive bankruptcy.
According to the document, the balances used for this presentation were be certified before layoffswhich, according to the lawsuit, would prove that there is insolvency planned. This maneuver would have been more than saving $9 billion in compensation and around $1.5 billion in salarieswhen he took part in the competition with a large part of the staff.
Questions about the applied scheme
The complaint describes this process as a mechanism to reduce the necessary liability and Transfer the costs of the adjustment to employees and creditors. He also claims that the competition was used to do this Shielding instrument of the economic groupthereby concentrating the loss on a single company while the rest continued operations.
That is, the competition would have been the culmination of an internal group depletion strategy through which the Piero Group he would have protected his businesses and transferred the loss to the Río Tercero plant.
Furthermore, it is doubtful that this would have been the case in the bankruptcy filing relevant information omitted. That’s what the criminal complaint says The reorganization and optimization of the group of companies is not badnor stop production if this is not the case profitable. “What is clearly illegal,” they claim, “is shifting the burden of that benefit to a third party and devising a plan to avoid the obligations that come with it.”
The recently filed case is now awaiting a response from the company’s lawyers. The company now has some smaller production units in Río Tercero, although these have been inactive since July, leading to ongoing open conflict.
The document describes this process as an automatic credit to employees, aimed at reducing costs the necessary liability and transfer the costs of the adjustment to employees and creditors.
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