The Government’s candidate for the Supreme Court, Ariel Lijodrove a Mercedes Benz E class 350, with a blue card issued by Caledonia Segurosthe company that belonged to his brother Alfredo “Freddy” Lijo. The data has been known since 2018. But until now it had not come to light that “Freddy” Lijo’s partner in that insurance company is a former PAMI official convicted of corruption who turned to a financial operator accused of laundering assets for one of the drug trafficking largest in Argentina and for a human trafficking networkas recorded in confidential and judicial documents to which he accessed THE NATION and confirmed by court sources.
The criminal plot behind that Mercedes Benz, two Porsche Carreras and twenty other cars that Caledonia Seguros accumulated was exposed in a half a dozen criminal files that are processed or processed in the ordinary jurisdiction, and in the Criminal and Correctional and Economic Criminal jurisdictions of the federal Justice, in the city of Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata and Chacoand some appeals even reached the Supreme Court, as verified THE NATION. And he also approached, obliquely, in the Council of the Judiciary, although The counselors filed the investigations into Judge Lijo without delving into those ramifications.
Suspicions focus on an associate of Freddy Lijo, Fernando Daperoa former PAMI trustee during the Menemist administration Victor Alderete which in October 2015 was sentenced to one year and eight months in prison by Federal Oral Court No. 6, plus special disqualification from holding public office. They convicted him for his role in a fraud detrimental to the public administrationwith a reduced sentence after reaching an agreement with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
Dapero’s conviction then passed through the Federal Court of Cassation, the country’s highest criminal court, and later reached the Supreme Court, which in October 2019 rejected the appeal of the former official, who by then was facing another criminal case for alleged fraud and fraud which was presented by his ex-wife, Gisela Mayer, and which was processed in the ordinary courts.
Mayer denounced Lijo’s partner, his brother Luis Dapero and two of his bishops, Rodolfo Fritz y Leopoldo “Polo” Carrena, possible front man. He accused them of setting up a network of offshore companies in Uruguay and the United States, to which they resorted to buy real estate in Argentina and the United States, launder assets and operate bank accounts in that country and in Uruguay, in a succession of maneuvers that she alleged were mounted to harm her.
The denunciation of Mayer and his acolytes caused a domino effect. The Investigative Prosecutor’s Office No. 54 requested the collaboration of the Office of the Attorney General for Economic Crime and Money Laundering (Procelac), which in October 2017 presented a reporta copy of which he obtained THE NATIONin which he set off all the alarms about one of the financial operators of Freddy Lijo’s partner: Polo Carrena.
“Carrena could be linked to other money laundering schemes from drug trafficking, as well as human trafficking.“, Procelac warned in its report, “which would support the need to investigate deeply regarding the role that this person plays in this type of criminal maneuvers,” it recommended.
In what criminal cases does Carrena appear? In at least three. The first, “White Charcoal”in which the Federal Oral Court of Resistencia sentenced, in March 2019, to 21 and 19 years in prison Carlos Salvatore, cataloged as the largest drug trafficker in Argentina, and Patricio Gorositothe leaders of the criminal organization that sent shipments of cocaine to Portugal and Spain camouflaged in bags of charcoal from Chaco.
The investigation later registered other people convicted of drug trafficking and money laundering, although the financier in charge of laundering Salvatore’s drug profits managed to escape. Until it fell in February 2021, in Mar del Plata. Your name? Leopoldo “Polo” Carrena. Today he heads to an oral trialas confirmed by judicial sources THE NATIONwhile federal Justice seeks to repatriate assets frozen in the United States, Switzerland and the Isle of Man.
An Argentine and American citizen, Polo Carrena had settled in Miami, from where he set up corporate networks and hatched other operations to launder the criminal proceeds of Salvatore and other clients, as reconstructed by the judicial sleuths when they even accessed the drug traffickers’ emails. Salvatore anointed him much more than as his figurehead, “friend and partner”, as he described it in one of his emails. He signed powers of attorney for her to manage and reinvest his profits.
The operations of the financier of Freddy Lijo’s partner and the drug trafficker Salvatore were also under the microscope of the Department of Homeland Security of the United States government. He informed the Argentine Justice that Polo Carrena had set up at least 43 business companies in Nevada, Delaware and Florida, some of which did not register movements. “We have not yet been able to determine the nature or sector of several of these companies,” he explained.
Carrena also accumulated problems in a fourth state in the United States: Montana. Some of the money laundering maneuvers that he developed for another criminal gang took place there, which the federal judge Maria Servini investigated on the call “due to La Moneta”, while the United States Justice required the extradition of several defendants. Among them, the owner of the financial company, Francisco “Cacho” Paganowho sealed an agreement with the North American authorities in 2019 and avoided going to prison in that country.
But the criminal ramifications of Polo Carrena do not end there. He appeared involved in real estate operations of Alejandro Ferrarelloalso investigated for money laundering, but not derived from drug trafficking, but from human traffickingin another file known as “causa Madaho’s” that is processed in the federal court of Mar del Plata.
In this context of suspicions surrounding Dapero and Carrena, Procelac provided another piece of information in its confidential report. “It is worth mentioning that Mr. Fernando Dapero could be linked to the company ‘Fernando Dapero and Alfredo Damián Lijo. Mr. Alfredo Lijo, brother of federal judge Ariel Lijo, would also be a partner of such entity.who is referred to in journalistic articles as ‘judicial manager’.”
consulted by THE NATION, Freddy Lijo confirmed that he was a partner of Dapero, but clarified that they distanced themselves years ago and he ended up selling him his 20% of the shares in Caledeco, the controlling firm of Caledonia., in May 2022. “The Dapero brothers came from having Federal, another insurance company, and they gave me any amount of work as a lawyer. I knew Fernando from when he had the criminal case for PAMI. And the way they paid me the fees was also through a de facto partnership that I had with Fernando. [Dapero] by the trademark ‘Caledonia’, although that didn’t work either. After a year the relationship broke up and I ended up fighting with them.”, he indicated.
Freddy Lijo also stressed that the white Mercedes Benz was his, but that he placed it in the name of Caledonia Seguros, like two other cars of his., to provide capital to the company, as a reserve. “After that, we decided to vacation as a family in Punta del Este, and For greater comfort and safety, we decided that I would travel in my truck and that Ariel would use my Mercedes Benz.. So I did what was appropriate: I issued a blue ID in Ariel’s name so that there would be no inconvenience on the route. But the Mercedes was mine”, he insisted.
All dismissed
The Procelac report, however, led to the extraction of testimonies in the ordinary Justice and the opening of another criminal investigation, which was processed before the Economic Criminal judge, Pablo Yadarola. It aimed to investigate the alleged money laundering maneuvers of Dapero and his collaborators, which joined another investigation, focused on the alleged illicit enrichment of Ariel Lijo, which was left in the hands of his colleague. Julian Ercoliniwith the participation of the anti-laundering unit (UIF) and her own Procelac. But both ended in dismissals.
After five years of investigation and thousands of pages, the judge Yadarola concluded that there was no evidence to prosecute Dapero, his brother, Carrena and Rodolfo Fritz; On the contrary, he dismissed themas confirmed by court sources THE NATIONwith the exception of a small section for alleged tax evasion that Dapero’s brother faces.
For its part, Judge Ercolini ordered the dismissal of Lijo and his brother Freddy in 2021after a proposal by federal prosecutor Franco Picardi, to the approval of the defense led by the current Minister of Justice, Mariano Cúneo Libarona. By then, Judge Lijo had stopped moving with the Mercedes Benz E 350 series, whose price floor is $150,000, from Caledonia Seguros.