forest444
forest444's JournalPanamá Papers: President Macri's Legal & Technical Secretary acted as intermediary in his offshoring
Information recently uncovered as part of the Panama Papers scandal that has embroiled Argentine President Mauricio Macri has now revealed that the Legal and Technical Secretary to the President, Pablo Clusellas, acted for 10 years as the broker between Macri and the Panamanian corporate law firm at the center of the scandal, Mossack Fonseca.
The Buenos Aires law firm in which Clusellas was a partner from 1999 to 2009 (Romero, Zapiola, Clusellas & Monpelat) appears listed in the Panama Papers leak as an "intermediary" between Mossack Fonseca and the Argentine owners of numerous offshore shell companies - including the Macri family's Sinosocma SA. Clusellas organized the legal and accounting structure of these offshore investments and even served in the Sinoscoma board of directors as recently as 2006.
Clusellas, a personal friend of President Macri since they were both children, officially left the law firm when Macri appointed him Legal and Technical Secretary to the Mayor of Buenos Aires upon taking office in 2007. The law firm's own public records, however, show that Clusellas remained a partner as late as 2009. His own asset declaration from 2014 show, moreover, that he retained a 1% share in the law firm.
Mossack Fonseca documents prove that lawyers from the disgraced Panamanian firm, which specializes in creating offshore shell companies for clients around the world, first visited Clusellas in his Buenos Aires office May 4, 1999. The Panamanian lawyers, per leaked documents, "presented new services, information, and techniques (Clusellas) did not know about, despite having great knowledge in this area himself."
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.ambito.com/836423-panama-papers-secretario-legal-y-tecnico-oficio-de-intermediario-para-firmas-offshore&prev=search
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[center]Why, it's 'law-and-order' man - President Panamacri.
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Amid 70,000 state layoffs, Macri hires image coach to make his wife into "the new Michelle Obama"
Argentine President Mauricio Macri makes no apologies for the 70,000 state layoffs ordered since he took office four months ago, referring to the fired employees as "junk contracts." He did, however, find room in his austerity budget for an image consultant for his wife, the socially maladroit First Lady of Argentina Juliana Awada.
The consultant, María Reussi, was given the newly created post of Assistant to the President on Matters of the First Lady and earns 90,000 pesos ($6,300) a month - a salary approaching that of the President's (130,000 pesos) and nearly six times the median full-time pay in Argentina. Her job, according to Reussi herself: "create a modern First Lady, in the style of Michelle Obama."
Introduced to Macri in 2003 during his failed first bid for Mayor of Buenos Aires by his now Chief of Staff Marcos Peña, Reussi is described as "Juliana's shadow." Her role goes far beyond that of the First Lady's social secretary (her official purview), instead including daily advice as to what to say, where to go, and how to behave in the political arena.
Reussi's task has not been easy. Ms. Awada is, despite being 42, very much a traditional First Lady who avoids speaking in public - least of all taking strong public policy positions like the last woman to serve as Argentina's First Lady, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, did during her husband Néstor Kirchner's 2003-07 term. Awada's first public speech as First Lady, in fact, was for a joint appearance with U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama during President Obama's state visit in March - a speech Reussi wrote. There have been none since.
Nevertheless as part of what Reussi refers to as the First Lady's "Obamization," Awada has been encouraged to appear in supermarkets from time to time and has even planted a vegetable garden on the grounds of the Quinta de Olivos presidential residence in suburban Buenos Aires.
But the differences with the adopted template aren't limited solely to Awada's professional background (or lack thereof). Whereas Mrs. Obama is an accomplished lawyer with a personal history of social and political commitment to her native Chicago, Ms. Awada's work experience is limited to head of fashion design at her family's own boutique chain 'Cheeky' - a firm repeatedly found to be operating sweatshops staffed with undocumented Bolivian immigrants in Buenos Aires' garment district.
María Reussi, however, isn't daunted. "You will want to give the impression of an active woman from the professional standpoint, and not so much from matters of protocol," she explained, adding that Juliana Awada "has always been committed to social issues. When Macri was mayor, for instance, she visited soup kitchens and child care centers."
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://noticias.perfil.com/2016/04/16/la-coach-de-la-primera-dama/&prev=search
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[center]
They're both beautiful. But only one owns a sweatshop.[/center]
Consumer confidence in Argentina plunges 18% from same time last year.
Following massive layoffs and rising inflation figures, consumer confidence in Argentina dropped by another 10.3% in April, and 18.3% compared to the same month last year according to the report published monthly by Torcuato Di Tella University Business School's Financial Research Center (CIF).
The negative outlook was shared broadly across income strata, with confidence declining 10% for those earning below the median (15,700 pesos, or $1,100) and 9.2% for those earning more. There were sharper regional differences, however, with confidence plunging 11.9% in the Greater Buenos Aires area, 11.7% in the country’s provinces, and just 2.5% in the city of Buenos Aires.
Confidence dropped furthest for purchasing durable goods (18.2%) and real estate (7.2%); the durable goods index in particular has plummeted by 60% since November. Confidence in the future of the country’s economy dropped 7.7%, and 11.8% in respondents' own financial situation. 60% of those surveyed still expect their personal finances to improve over the next year (down from 66% in March); but 66% admitted it had worsened from a year earlier (up from 60% in March).
Consumer sentiment has fallen by 28.4% since November 2015, the month before President Mauricio Macri took office. Higher inflation was mostly to blame for the souring mood according to the report, followed by the impact of 127,000 job losses since January.
Prices in Buenos Aires, the recommended index by the national government in the absence of official data under Macri, rose 3.3% in March - accumulating a 11.9% hike on the first three months of the year. The government’s stated goal is to keep inflation below 25% this year; market and labor analysts, however, now believe it will be unlikely to be less than 50%.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/213056/consumer-confidence-plunges-18
Paul Singer’s gushing praise makes awkward reading for Argentina's Macri.
The government’s relationship with some of the most influential players in global finance drew attention yesterday, after a gushing profile written by vulture fund boss Paul Singer praising President Mauricio Macri was published.
Singer, who made billions of dollars thanks to the government’s recent deal with holdout funds, wrote a profile of Argentine President Mauricio Macri as part of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” special edition, in which the Argentine president was named alongside such leaders as U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese head of state Xi Jinping.
“Macri has removed Argentina’s currency controls, allowing more freedom for trade. He has pledged to reintegrate Argentina into the global economy, seeking private investment from abroad,” Singer wrote, hailing the president as “a champion of reform.”
On the same day other reports emerged indicating the government’s improved relations with credit rating agencies and the International Monetary Fund, Singer praised right-wing leader strongly. Singer also claimed the president “has taken action to end the 15-year default that has kept the country in economic exile since 2001.”
“Macri still has important tasks ahead of him... but if he lives up to his promise, Argentina may finally do the same,” Singer concluded.
The billionaire stands to benefit greatly today from some of those Macri decisions, as the country is expected to pay $2.4 billion to his Cayman Islands-based hedge fund NML Capital in order to settle a decade-long legal conflict that began when other holdout bondholders refused to accept Argentina’s 2005 debt restructuring and sued the country in New York courts. According to Columbia University School of Business Professor Martín Guzmán, those bonds were originally purchased by Singer in 2008 at around $117 million.
When other holdouts are added to the bill, Argentina’s payments today will amount to more than $9 billion.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/213054/paul-singer%E2%80%99s-gushing-praise-makes-awkward-reading-for-president
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A $2.4 billion payout for a $117 million bad faith investment, and that's the thanks Macri gets? The political attack ad practically writes itself with this one.
Argentina says Ciao Default, paying holdouts after 14 years.
Source: Reuters
Argentina paid holdout bondholders on Friday who had refused debt restructurings after a record 2002 default, closing the book on nearly a decade of messy litigation as new President Mauricio Macri embraces global financial markets.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa in Manhattan confirmed the payments and issued an order allowing Argentina to resume servicing its renegotiated bonds, lifting an injunction that had blocked payment to most of Argentina's bondholders since 2014.
The injunction against paying restructured debt was one of many hardball tactics that Griesa authorized against Macri's predecessor, leftist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who denounced the hard-line holdouts as "vulture funds." Those funds, led by London-based Aurelius Capital Management and Paul Singer's Cayman Islands-based NML Capital Ltd, were among hedge funds that received more than $6 billion in settlements on Friday, according to court documents. Argentina also set aside about $3 billion in escrow to cover holdouts that had not settled by Feb. 29.
Payments on bonds restructured in 2005 and 2010 (92%) - the ones blocked in 2014 by Griesa - should resume in the next few weeks, officials led by Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay told investors last week during a road show for Argentina's first global bond sale in 15 years. Argentina sold $16.5 billion of sovereign debt this week, the biggest bond sale ever from an emerging market and the country's first global issue in 15 years. The deal raised funds to pay today's settlements and potentially paved the way for Argentine corporate borrowers.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-debt-idUSKCN0XJ1OO
According to Joseph Stiglitz, this gives TARP baby Paul Singer an 1,180% payout. He bought $48 million in old Argentine bonds in 2008 from a reseller, and stocked up on another $129 million just last year to pass himself off as a "me too" bondholder; his take: $2.25 billion (all going to the Caymans).
Nice work if you can get it.
This payout (and Greasa's rulings) in effect endorses this kind of scam, guaranteeing it will happen again in the future - possibly to U.S. bonds, if Congressional Republicans trigger a default sometime in the next few years.
How to Hack an Election
Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time.
It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá’s upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, brick-like, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “</head>” and “<body>” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto’s victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.
When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory.
Sepúlveda’s career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small—mostly defacing campaign websites and breaking into opponents’ donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasn’t cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few.
His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Many of Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful; but he has enough wins that he might be able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century.
“My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish, while sitting in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election.
He has agreed to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced sentence.
At: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/
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Posted earlier today by berniepdx420 on GDP (http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511810858). Probably fun and games compared to what's happening here as we speak.
The data of all Filipino voters has been hacked ahead of general election.
Source: Time
A massive leak from a database containing personal details of more than 55 million registered voters in the Philippines will not compromise the May 9 national elections, officials said Friday, in the latest hacking scandal to hit the Southeast Asian nation.
Government agents late Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old suspect, a new graduate of information technology, in his home in Manila. Officials said they are hunting down his alleged accomplices.
Commission on Election spokesman James Jiménez said the automated elections will be run on a different server, not on the one that was hacked, and that experts say the polls are unlikely to be compromised.
The leaked data include voters’ names, birthdays, home addresses, email, parents’ full names and in some cases passport details and text markers of fingerprints.
Read more: http://time.com/4304476/philippines-vote-hack-election/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook
Sounds familiar...
Electricity consumption in Argentina falls by a record 9.4% in March after Macri triples rates.
The hike in utility rates decreed by the right-wing administration of Argentine President Mauricio Macri in February has led to a record 9.4% plunge in demand in March compared to the same month last year, according to the Fundelec foundation.
The drop in consumption, Fundelec noted, was registered despite the fact that temperatures in March did not vary significantly when compared to their historic March average. The report noted that the plunge in consumption contrasted sharply with record consumption levels a year ago, which had been growing at nearly 4% a year and exceeded 140 gwh for all of 2015.
The new trend was also more marked in the Buenos Aires metro area, which includes both the city of Buenos Aires and its suburbs. Electricity consumption in that region (home to one in three Argentines) was down by almost 12%, with a 12.1% drop for Edenor users and a 11.6% for Edesur clients. Consumptionn in the rest of the country fell by 8.3%.
The sudden fall in electricity use came after Energy Minister Juan José Aranguren announced a reduction in subsidies to electricity consumption, leading to a hike in rates averaging 200 to 300%. In one particularly controversial case the University of La Matanza, in suburban Buenos Aires, saw its electricity bill jump from 100,000 pesos ($11,000) in March 2015 to 700,000 pesos ($48,000) this March - a 600% hike.
Aranguren defended the decision as a bid to reduce the country's budget deficit of $25 billion in 2015, with the further goal of raising money to improve the country’s strained electrical infrastructure. He added that the new rates would mean that users "would now be more likely to ration the use of energy and put their consumption in line with the real cost of producing it."
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/212984/electricity-consumption-plunges
And: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.politicargentina.com/notas/201604/13353-la-universidad-de-la-matanza-pago-700-mil-pesos-de-luz-y-denuncian-que-peligra-su-funcionamiento.html&prev=search
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Meanwhile, the wealthy received a $10 billion tax cut. So much for the virtues of being a deficit hawk.
Bernie Sanders discusses big brother, foreign policy, & baseball with René Pérez Joglar of Calle 13.
Argentine Central Bank's Sturzenegger & Judge Bonadío, a Macri ally, charged in dollar futures case.
Argentine Federal Prosecutor Jorge di Lello accused the President of the Central Bank, Federico Sturzenegger, and Buenos Aires Judge Claudio Bonadío, a key right-wing ally of President Mauricio Macri, of enabling the payment of dollar future contracts that resulted in a $4 billion loss for the Central Bank after the 40% devaluation ordered by Macri four months ago.
The charges range from fraud by mismanagement, abuse of authority, and violation of duties of public officials in Sturzenegger's case; to malfeasance, procedural fraud, and attempted illegal detention in the case of Bonadío.
The case stems from charges that Judge Bonadío, at Macri's request, had filed against former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and other officials in her administration over the same dollar futures contracts on March 29.
The move backfired when during subsequent testimony former President Fernández de Kirchner provided proof that numerous Macri officials and members of his inner circle had purchased millions of dollars in the same futures contracts, and personally profited when Macri devalued the peso.
These include:
* Francisco Macri, Macri's father, who purchased $8 million. The elder Macri, a developer and contractor who's faced numerous charges of defrauding the state over the last three decades, co-owned most of the offshore accounts involved in the Panamá Papers and Open Corporates leaks with President Macri and other family members.
* Nicolás Caputo: $3.6 million. Caputo, a close friend of Macri's since childhood and best man at his last wedding in 2014, faces charges related to campaign contributions to the Macri campaign while his firm received large Buenos Aires municipal contracts while Macri was mayor (which is illegal in Argentina).
* Mario Quintana, Secretary of Interministerial Coordination: $1.5 million.
* José María Torello, chief domestic adviser to President Macri and nominal head of Macri's right-wing PRO party: $800,000.
* Gustavo Lopetegui, Macri's Secretary of Public Policy Coordination: $310,000. Lopetegui has also been criticized for having Aerolíneas Argentinas discontinue a number of profitable domestic routes to benefit its chief rival LAN Argentina (in which he served as CEO until his appointment).
The futures contracts in question, which stipulated a March 2016 exchange rate of 10.65, were issued in the second half of last year and are being blamed by Macri for the $4 billion loss incurred by the Central Bank when he devalued the peso from 9.75 to nearly 14 to the dollar last December 17.
Former Economy Minister Axel Kicillof pointed out, however, that by both U.S. and Argentine law the Central Bank cannot, as Macri suggested, sell dollar future contracts in New York (the only ROFEX market offering 14 to 15 pesos per contract at the time). Former Central Bank President Alejandro Vanoli added that selling futures contracts at those values at the time would have implied a sharp devaluation in itself.
Bonadío was also accused by Kicillof of concocting "cut-and-paste" cases against Kirchner officials based solely on articles in Argentina's right-wing media. The Clarín Group and La Nación, which had been aggressively promoting the futures case in their news outlets, themselves bought $11 million and $4 million in futures, respectively.
Their support proved decisive to Macri's narrow victory last year, and both had been calling for a devaluation at the same time these futures contracts were purchased.
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.ambito.com/835993-imputaron-a-sturzenegger-y-bonadio-por-pagar-los-contratos-del-dolar-futuro&prev=search
And: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.diarioregistrado.com/economia/que-es-el-dolar-futuro-y-por-que-se-trata-de-una-causa--voligoma-_a570d61b39fea936d68b8b54b&prev=search
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