Friday, May 24, 2013

The Kirchners, corruption, jail...

Journalist Jorge Lanata has been hitting the Kirchners pretty hard recently.   Everyone expects Argentine politicians to be corrupt  - it is just the sad history of the country -- but it looks like it is even worse than people thought.

For my part, I have long thought the Kirchners were super-corrupt.  I think I wrote about it here at the time, but during the financial crisis, the Kirchners net worth DOUBLED.  The whole world lost half of their asset values, but the Kirchners doubled their net worth (and not by shorting).  

And that is just what they reported on their official forms.  The tough part of stealing money as a politician here is the laundering.  Just think about that for a second.

One of the main Kirchner cronies Lazaro Baez just invited reporters into his home to show them how he had a large wine cellar in place of where Lanata had recently reported that he installed a bank vault to hide all his yet-to-be-laundered cash.   It all went according to plan until...

...the worker who Lazaro Baez hired took pictures of himself taking out the bank vault and sent them to reporters.    Pretty smart move by the worker, because otherwise there would have been an incentive for him to suffer a mysterious accident (eg how Baez originally earned his money).

It is enough to make you wish the Kirchners went back to just sticking the Argentine IRS on their opponents.

2 comments:

Kevin Whited said...

Careful, there, we don't want you jailed before departure!

Evan said...

I do not think they are efficient enough to track me down in time.