Panamá Papers: influential Argentine right-wing daily La Nación in the eye of the storm.
Just days after Argentine President Mauricio Macri was named as part of the massive offshore tax evasion scheme reveled by the Panamá Papers, the country's influential conservative daily La Nación was listed as a client as well.
Ironically, La Nación is one of 108 international media outlets working with the International Consortium of investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to organize and disseminate the leaked documents.
The newspaper, already facing fallout over op-eds in opposition to ongoing dictatorship-era human rights abuse trials, must now face news that the director of the La Nación SA media group, Luis Saguier, and other executives have been clients of the Panamanian corporate law firm Mossack Fonseca, which since 1977 oversaw a vast tax evasion and money laundering operation through the use of shell companies prepared and often managed by the firm itself.
The daily was thus put in the embarrassing position of having to report its own participation in the scheme, which it delayed until its Sunday edition of April 10, because, according to their article, "many of the 11 million documents to which La Nación was able to have access, through the ICIJ and the Süddeutsche Zeitung are still being processed."
The shell company was part of an apparent corporate inversion involving La Nación's sale of its lucrative classified ad division to Navent Group Ltd., one of whose subsidiaries is located in Panamá. The sale was paid for with Navent shares in January 2015 and deposited in the Panama subsidiary; La Nación's director, Luis Saguier, is on the board of both Navent Group Ltd and La Nación SA. The newspaper said that the information regarding this acquisition was recorded at the time to the Public Commercial Register.
La Nación, which openly called for the removal of both President Néstor Kirchner (by a coup) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (by impeachment), supported President Macri's right-wing campaign last year - which he narrowly won thanks in large measure to corporate media support. Macri, however, is now reeling from revelations that he was a principal in at least three offshore shell companies with his father, a public contractor with a lengthy record of defrauding the state.
Macri had frequently promised greater transparency and a fight against corruption both during his 2015 campaign and since taking office on December 10. In all, the Panamá Papers case involves some 600 Argentine nationals - including at least eight individuals in Macri's administration or inner circle (including his father).
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.lemonde.fr/panama-papers/article/2016/04/14/panama-papers-l-influent-quotidien-argentin-la-nacion-dans-la-tourmente_4902133_4890278.html&prev=search
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As bad as this is, the Navent heist pales in comparison to La Nación's continued use of an expired tax credit which, over the last 12 years, has cost federal coffers around $50 million. The (heavily Opus Dei) Buenos Aires courts have sat on the case for years, effectively giving them carte blanche to continue claiming the credit.
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I hadn't made it to that one yet.
