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forest444

(5,902 posts)
Tue Jun 28, 2016, 09:18 PM Jun 2016

Macri names son of dictatorship's chief economist, ISDS litigant against Argentina, to patent office

Last edited Tue Jun 28, 2016, 09:48 PM - Edit history (1)

Argentine President Mauricio Macri replaced the heads of the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), the office responsible for protecting industrial patents, with two corporate lawyers whose firm represented numerous multinationals suing Argentina over the past decade.

The two appointees, Dámaso Pardo and José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, jr, were chosen by decree to replace Mario Aramburu and Mario Díaz, who had served as INPI director and assistant director, respectively, since 2002.

Pardo and Martínez de Hoz are partners in the Buenos Aires corporate law firm of Pérez Alati, Grondona, Benites Arntsen & Martínez de Hoz, which advises transnational corporations as to Argentine intellectual property law and have represented numerous multinationals suing Argentina in front of the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment (ICSID). The ICSID is the world's preeminent investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunal, whose rulings often override national sovereignty and whose secret inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has created an international uproar against the agreement.

Martínez de Hoz is also the son of the late José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, whose tenure as Economy Minister from 1976 to 1981 was marked by free trade policies that flooded Argentina with imports and reduced industrial output by 20%, wage freezes that reduced real pay by 40%, and by financial deregulation that led to $30 billion in bad debts by 1981 as well as the country's ruinous debt crisis throughout the 1980s.

His appointment was also controversial because he in particular represented multinationals in patent infringement lawsuits against Argentine firms - particularly the pharmaceutical industry. The South American Patent Observatory, a leading continental watchdog against patent lawsuits by multinationals thought to be filed in bad faith in order to intimidate local firms, called Martínez de Hoz's designation "incompatible with his public duties" for this reason.

Their appointment is in keeping with a Macri administration preference for appointing corporate lobbyists to oversee the very agencies charged with regulating their respective industries.

Some prominent examples include:

* The Finance Ministry, headed by a JP Morgan private banker (Alfonso Prat-Gay) closely linked to billion-dollar tax evasion case involving the late cement baroness Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat as her former accountant.

* The Central Bank, headed by the official (Federico Strurzenegger) who still faces fraud charges stemming from the 2001 Megaswap - which added over $38 billion to the public debt and yielded participating banks hefty commissions.

* The head of the National Bank (Carlos Melconian) who in 2001 had dropped investigations into a $15 billion bailout from 1982 and later joined vulture funds in their recent bid for 1,600% payouts on old defaulted bonds (which Macri awarded them in February).

* The Energy Ministry, whose head (Juan José Aranguren) is now facing charges of using his office to benefit his former employer, Shell Argentina, with expensive natural gas imports from a Chilean subsidiary.

* And the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF), the federal money laundering abatement bureau, whose new appointees, Mariano Federici and María Eugenia Talerico, previously defended banks charged with wrongdoing by the UIF - notably, in Talerico's case, HSBC Argentina, which was revealed by the 2014 SwissLeaks scandal to be at the center of a massive tax evasion scheme on behalf of wealthy Argentines.

The bank’s CEO, Gabriel Martino, and its director, Miguel Ángel Estévez, had their banking license revoked by the UIF in 2015 under Sbatella; but returned to their posts in May thanks to a reversal of the decision by the UIF's current leadership.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/economia/2-302830-2016-06-28.html&prev=search
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Macri names son of dictatorship's chief economist, ISDS litigant against Argentina, to patent office (Original Post) forest444 Jun 2016 OP
This is an explosion of bad news for the Argentinian citizens who must pay taxes & try to survive. Judi Lynn Jun 2016 #1

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
1. This is an explosion of bad news for the Argentinian citizens who must pay taxes & try to survive.
Wed Jun 29, 2016, 12:16 AM
Jun 2016

It's as if he is rounding up every criminal qualified to do the most damage to Argentina's economy, to the people, themselves.

I truly have never seen anything like this.

This post leaves one stunned and almost ill only half-way through. You have to summon yourself to refocus on the remainder.

How, why would he do this? Doesn't he worry he'll be thrown out on his gnarly nose? Looks as if he thinks he has too much power now for anyone to challenge him.

Thanks for posting these new items. It's far better to know now, than to wonder what the hell happened to Argentina later!

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