A report by the Airport Security Police (PSA) reveals that José Luis Espert made 36 trips on two planes by Federico Andrés “Fred” Machado, who has an extradition request from the United States for cocaine traffic and is imprisoned with domiciliary in Viedma. It was throughout 2019 while campaigning with the aspiration to be president of the Nation for the Unite party. In five of those flights, where there were seven passengers, it coincided with the owner of the aircraft. He was not only the well -known transfer to Viedma that the current deputy and renewed candidate admits, since his thanks to the suspected narco is recorded/filmed. He also shared a trip with him from Catamarca to San Fernando airport, another from San Fernando to Villa María and the Viedma sections to Bahía Blanca and from there again to the Buenos Aires airport. In a judicial case that opened on April 19, 2021, one day after the arrest of Machado, Espert presented unusual a discharge last March-that is-with four years of Delay. As he published Page/12 There he said that his link with Machado is “null” and that he has no idea of partisan expenses. He spent several days without responding for himself or not about the transfer of 200,000 dollars detected by Texas justice. It was almost not necessary. The newspaper The nation He published the extract of an accounting book of the Bank of America where the international transfer of those dollars is registered. Later, near midnight, Espert published in his X account a video where he tried to explain the origin of that money.
The file in question is in charge of Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi and his investigation was promoted by prosecutor Alejandra Mangano long ago, in June 2021. The original complaint, made by Adrián Marcelo Bastianes-a frequent denunciator, president of the La Voz Citizen Its aircraft. In expenses and campaign donations there are no private contributions. The axis of the cause is placed, as this newspaper was able to rebuild, on the Avión de Espet trips and in elucidating who paid for them. The hypothesis of money laundering is the central.
That is why as part of the investigation a report had been required to the PSA, which showed several interesting data. In some Espert journeys he was accompanied by his candidate for Vice, the journalist Luis Rosales, sometimes also with Nazareno Etchepare organizer of the campaign and even with his wife, Mercedes González, and other names such as businessman Iván Sherman, investor in a vulture fund appear. To all this is added a striking aspect: there are three flights in which Espert traveled alone. He used one of the airplanes to make a minimum journey between San Fernando and Parchment (this also did it with his wife just time) where he is a native and where his family lives. It is difficult to think that it was going to campaign.
In the discharge he had presented to Martínez de Giorgi he said in his own defense that his link with Machado is “null”, something that does not seem to reflect the shared trips and some testimonies that met in the last hours, that he only met him in an event with important entrepreneurs and that the owner of the planes offered to take him in one to Viedma to go to the presentation of his book ” campaign. Outside that denied any relationship. He also said he was foreign to proselytizing expenses since the Unite party for freedom and dignity was not his but José Bonacci, its president. It was defined as an “extra party candidate.”
Cúneo Libarona’s footprint
“It does not intervene personally in the hiring of the aircraft, or in the accountability. I ignore it completely if the political party suffered expenses, there was some kind according to this subject (which I was completely oblivious) and I did not participate in the elaboration and surrender of funds,” he tried to take sorry in his presentation in the case, dating from March 13. There the deputy, who presides over the Budget Commission, said that he knew that in the file there were records of his trips, but said not to know what or who paid. He added that he ignored that the planes belonged to Machado. He pointed out “in a conjectural basis, that either the party authorities contacted Machado given their predisposition to facilitate its aircraft when they offered to move with him to Viedma, or it happened in reverse.”
The world is a handkerchief. As well as the suspect of Narco Machado shares a lawyer with Javier Milei, since Francisco Oneto represents as well as the President, on his side, he got his within the study founded by Mariano Cúneo Libarona, the current Minister of Justice. Augusto Nicolás Garrido, a member of that buffetit is the lawyer who signs at the foot of the today’s first candidate for deputy for Libertad advances. In the heading it only says that Espert is presented in its own right, but who enters the writing to the system is Garrido. That digital trail is inocable.
The Oneto lawyer does not seem like a distribution character in this story. Not only for his link with Milei. He has managed to delay the extradition of Machado, which has been in process in the Supreme Court since May 2022. This week Jorge Yoma revealed that this year they went to see him from the alleged narco to hire him and that Lobby did with the aim that the interim prosecutor Eduardo Casal took his opinion before the highest court. Yoma said he refused and offered lawyers from the United States. He told this newspaper that they explained that they wanted to take the failure for extradition because they had an expectation of “fixing” the situation of Machado in that country. For the results, Yoma concludes that some lobbist must have been achieved. Casal ruled in April 2023 that it had to be extradited, and the court did nothing.
Last month the supremes told the judge of Neuquén that he had sentenced the extradition that requested information from the northern country to see what the cause is and if something was modified on the factual platform. It is easy to consult for the electronic system, unless the intention is to induce a suggestion to the justice of Texas, where it processes the cause against Machado and seven other people and from which the proof of the transfer of 200,000 dollars of a trust of the man and his partner arose, Debra Lynn Mercer-Erwin, sentenced to 16 years in prison. Every time they asked Espert for this issue, which is the one that highlighted his relationship with “Fred,” replied with evasive. It does not deny or confirm. He only talks about political operations.
Itinerary
Espert traveled on two aircraft attributed to Machado. The one who used par excellence is a Beechcraft King Air B-200 for seven or eight passengers Chapa LV CBZ. On the trip to Viedma of April 18, 2018 that the candidate recognizes in the Bombardier Challenger with N28FM patent, which also passed through Bahía Blanca. The list of flights linked to Machado in which he traveled Espert includes as current destinations, Catamarca, Santiago del Estero, Córdoba, Villa María, Santa Fe, Rosario, Rafaela, Posadas (Misiones), La Rioja, Tucumán, Viedma, Villa Gesell, Mar del Plata, Formosa, Bahía Blanca, Mendoza, Salta, Jujuy and Pergamino. They were mostly in April, May, July and August 2019. Everything indicates that the King Air was in the Hangar de San Fernando. That is also what the pilot Axel Vugdelija declared, who explained that his boss was crushed.
According to consultations of Page/12 To experts in the market for private flights and aerial taxis, the cost of 36 trips could be around $ 315,000. Vugdeelija explained the mechanism to fix trips: “Someone called the spert environment told me the itinerary and the passenger list.” He said she was a woman but does not remember her name. His testimony dates back to 2023. The pilot clarified that he did not know what he wore the spert flights although he remembered that he told him that he was going to see his mother to Pergamino. He said that there were many, not how many, and all within the Argentine territory. Unite the electoral justice rejected the surrender of campaign expenses. There is also an administrative process in process that did not end, of which Espert is exempt because, as shown, he did not have a position in the structure. However, he was a candidate for president.
It is also quite obvious that it was the link with Machado. The trip to Viedma was not the first one he did with him. Before he had gone together on April 15 to Villa María in Córdoba and Catamarca. The first flight that Espet made with the King Air went to Santiago del Estero three days before.
Testimonies
The cause processed in Comodoro Py was reactivated in recent days. This week, Juan Eduardo Alejandro Gatti, Med Aviation Manager, who worked with Machado flights. But in his case the story had a valuable appearance that did not have to do exactly with 2019 but years before, when he met Machado on a vacation in Miami. They had told him that the company South Aviation had in progress the reconstruction of a North American T-28 “museum key”. It turns out that the suspected narco wanted to bring that plane to Argentina and offered him if he wanted to move him, who was delighted. He was, he said, in 2014 and took eleven days with scales. “Fred Machado traveled from the United States to see his plane, I guess I would like to see the state in which he was. Some time later and after solving a damage he asked him to pilot him back to the United States because he had sold it in a million dollars. He told him no.
The testimony would go in line with one of the accusations that weigh on Machado, who was discovered in Texas for a journalistic investigation, that a small town, Onalaska, where there was no airport appeared as one of the most registered aircraft in the country. Several planes registered there had been confiscated in Central and South America with cocaine. A television report ended with the accusation against Machado and other accomplices, accused washing and drug trafficking and also to cheat with a Ponzi scheme in the sale of airplanes. At the same time, there is the theory that American planes brought to Argentina would have fewer controls and crushed could aim to arm a fleet. This is also raised in the complaint made by Juan Grabois in the courts of San Isidro, where he includes the notorious patrimonial growth of 789 percent, since the end of the 2019 campaign.
Next week, on Monday, another witness of the same company must be presented –med Aviation-Marcelo Rodríguez.
It will be necessary to see if Clara Montero Barré is also cited, the former Press Chief of the Espert Campaign, whom the journalist Marcelo Longobardi had referred as someone who contacted him to warn him that Machado wanted to talk to him in the story of the presidential campaign. They wanted to offer a candidacy for Vice President. The woman said Machado was “much more than a contributor.” He stressed that with Machado “they did not see themselves once, as Espert says. They were several meetings. I myself witnessed at least two meetings between them, and then Espert traveled to the United States to see him there.” He also said that Machado paid him, he doesn’t know how much or for what.
