“He made me wait between 45 minutes and an hour; then he had me come into his office (…) and said to me: ‘You know what you have to do’, ‘I’m going to make you shit’, ‘I’m going to make you melt’, ‘I’m going to stay with your company, I’m going to stand up for you and your family’.”
The story is part of it Patricio Gerbione of the repentant businessmen. It was read out today at the start of a new hearing in the trial of Bribery Notebooksin the context of the statements of the accused collaborators in the case known as “La Camarita”. Payment details and read the Threats that the managers would have received for carrying them out.
The businessman Gerbi attributes these sayings to this Claudio Ubertia former Kirchner official who was fired when Antonini Wilson’s suitcase broke out. Uberti would have been one of the spearheads of the alleged extortion and illegal debt collection system. “His treatment was violent, demeaning, insulting and arrogant. The pressure I experienced was emotionally destructive,” Gerbi said of him.
Gerbi’s statement, like those of other colleagues, shows this Businessmen as victims an extortion system that, in addition to explicit threats, also included fines for the driving companies and delayed payments for concessions that had already been awarded.
Eventually, Gerbi said, he and others in his company agreed to make the payments. “The deliveries were about three deliveries per year; they were in pesos and were equivalent to about $15,000, $20,000 or $25,000 each; but Uberti was never satisfied“He continued to threaten us,” he described.
However, the pressure did not only come from representatives of Kirchnerism. As he described in his statement, one of them, whom he did not know at the time, blurted out at a meeting on the National Highway attended by several people: “Get out of this tender because it is not for you.“.
It was about Fabian de Sousabut Gerbi didn’t know, so he asked him who he was. “I am the one who will make sure they stop paying you, review all your contracts and drive your company into bankruptcy,” said the businessman linked to Kirchnerism.
Gerbi’s statement was followed by that of the deceased Joseph Chediack. “If you want to keep working, you have to pay,” he told him. Julio De Vido at the first meeting he had with him, in the apartment that the former minister has on Avenida Libertador.
“I felt really intimidated by this situation; something like this had never happened to me before. I was able to explain to him that we were in a crisis, the crisis of 2001, but He treated me like a crybaby; He told me that we need to understand that this is so. I understood the message very clearly and at the same time I started bringing some amounts of money to his house” he said, according to today’s hearing.
In his statement, Chediack described that for a time he had been making monthly deliveries, most of them in pesos in the living room of De Vido’s housenext to some “bonsai” trees, although he sometimes left the money behind in a bathroom at the Planning Department. But the system changed in 2004, he said, after a meeting at the Argentine Chamber of Road Contractors on Piedras Street.
“(Ernesto) Clarens presented himself as the Kirchners’ financier and gave very precise instructions. He told us: “If you want to work, you have to pay.” Here you are a friend or you are an enemy; There are no neutral states. “You have to pay me.”
Chediack added that the financier Clarens had distributed cards with the address of an office in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, on the Carabellas passage. “You call me and bring me the money here” he told them.
Since Chediack didn’t show up, he said the threats against him got worse. “Listen to me baby, I want you on Monday with the 250,000 pesos, don’t be the scapegoat, Don’t be the first idiot we make shit happen toClarens would have told him.
“I paid Clarens three to five times a year. The last payment must have been made at the beginning of 2015,” the businessman said.
Chediack died on September 18, 2023 after an aircraft accident in San Luis province.
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