Odebrecht case: a repentant has confirmed in detail the course of the bribe

Manuel Vázquez, the leader of Jaime, ratified the information that had emerged in Brazil

Manuel Vázquez, the representative of the former Secretary of Transport, Ricardo Jaime, confessed that the number of bribes requested by his boss was well over 20 million dollars. He provided three names and described a criminal operation which, according to LA NACION, rebuilt, coincides with the denunciations brought before the Brazilian justice of the Odebrecht leaders, the bank records of the transfers and the accumulated emails of Vázquez himself and of other actors in this plot for a decade.

Before the federal prosecutor Franco Picardi and part of his family in the corridor of the fifth floor of the federal courts of Comodoro Py, Vázquez has taken the step after two previous threats. He did it a day before his heart surgery.

He added that the first bribes for the US $ 1,500 million Sarmiento railway burial project had been negotiated with the owner of the construction company Iecsa, Ángelo Calcaterra, and his two lieutenants, Javier Sánchez Caballero and Santiago Altieri.

Both before the Court and the press, Calcaterra and his collaborators have denied having corrupted officials for this project and have delimited this possibility in another construction company that has integrated the consortium: "If Odebrecht did, c & o Was by itself, "said the cousin of President Mauricio Macri in a brief filed before federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi.

However, the testimonies and evidence collected by the Brazilian justice, a copy of which was obtained by LA NACION, as well as other official and private documents to which this newspaper has had access in recent years, show significant coincidences with the confessions of Vázquez. Among other things, by dates, amounts, people involved and methodology:

– According to former Vice President of Odebrecht for Latin America, Luiz Antonio Mameri, Sánchez Caballero was the voice that presided at the burial of the Sarmiento train. And it is this executive of Iecsa, according to Mameri, who would have informed them that they had agreed with the officials of the Ministry of Planning to win the call for tenders and to face "undue payments" when they would start to recover the work.

– According to Vázquez, the talks began between 2005 and 2006, when he agreed with Calcaterra and Sánchez Caballero of an initial payment of 5 million US dollars, then another payment of 15 million US dollars to direct the call for tenders for the consortium formed by Iecsa, Odebrecht, Ghella and Comsa. . Total: 20 million USD.

– Brazilian justice has found at least five messages regarding the Sarmiento train brigades of other leaders of Odebrecht. In one of them, Mauricio Courí Ribeiro evoked a meeting in June 2010 with Sánchez Caballero to discuss the so-called bribery payment "DGI". Total sum? Also $ 20 million.

– According to documents obtained by LA NACION, Vázquez started asking for "transport policy advice" from Iecsa, Odebrecht and Comsa since October 2005 and even suggested, in an e-mail of April 2006, move carefully to avoid "the next undesirable surveys" of the press on public works projects "inflated by pricing".

– Vázquez agreed with Odebrecht to pay money through the same leader who had contact with Sánchez Caballero, Courí Ribeiro, to whom he transmitted that he had received "a lot of pressure because of the delay in the operation ". And on October 4, 2007, he received an e-mail from Courí Ribeiro, who confirmed a transfer of 100,000 USD. It was sent under the title "adquisição de propiedades" from a report by Constructora Internacional del Sur, a company known to the Brazilian, Panamanian and Peruvian judges, which determined that Odebrecht had used it for pay bribes to the children of Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli and several Brazilian and Peruvian officials.

– At the end of June 2009, just two weeks before Jaime's resignation, Courí Ribeiro crossed couriers with Vázquez for another Odebrecht payment. He left an account with Northern Trust International Banking Corp., in New York, at Walsh Partners Corp., a British Virgin Islands offshore company that operated a bank account with the Swiss bank Merrill Lynch, whose "beneficiary", according to Vázquez, it would be Enrique Fahrion.

– In 2010, Vázquez was already under the magnifying glbad of justice and the press. In this context, Odebrecht stopped the payments, which the representative of Jaime claimed by mail. "This whole process is shameful," he told Courí Ribeiro in February, at a price of $ 80,000 pending.

– After the death of Néstor Kirchner in October 2010, with whom Jaime had a direct dialogue, the repentants of Odebrecht claim that Vázquez and Sánchez Caballero were relegated to interlocutors. It was at this point that Jorge "Corcho" Rodríguez appeared as an intermediary and that another step was taken, in which they also indicated the number two of Julio De Vido at the Federal Ministry of Planning, Roberto Baratta.

– Before the prosecutor Franco Picardi, Vázquez confessed to having negotiated the bribes with Calcaterra and Sánchez Caballero, but entrusted him the role of payer to another leader of Iecsa, Santiago Altieri.

According to a report presented by AFIP to Judge Martínez de Giorgi on September 29, Altieri is a proxy for the UTE account at Banco Río, of which US $ 4,495,000 was credited to the account of the Spanish company DSC Workshop in Spain. Private Bank of Andorra (BPA) which has been used to channel bribes in Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil and Ecuador, among other countries.

– Before Judge Martínez de Giorgi, Calcaterra and Sánchez Caballero denied having paid bribes to officials of the Ministry of Planning for the burial of Sarmiento.

But on the same fourth floor of the Courts of Comodoro Py they both appeared before Federal Judge Claudio Bonadio and admitted, as "repentants", handbags to officials of the Ministry of Planning, such as the says the driver Oscar Centeno in his notebooks. . But not in terms of bribes, clarified, but as "contributions to the campaign".