Pablo González from Santa Cruz took office on February 24, 2021, replacing Guillermo Nielsen. A lawyer by profession, his resume includes various positions in the public service. He was director of Distrigas and manager of Legal Affairs of Public Services in Santa Cruz, and also served as chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, government minister, provincial deputy and national senator. In 2015 he was elected as deputy governor of the province and in 2019 he became a national deputy, a position he resigned to assume as president of the YPF board.
The complaint processed by Servini -and which González ratified last June- revealed that a YPF security employee, responsible for internal counterintelligence tasks established by protocol in all companies listed on Wall Street, entered the president’s office outside working hours and photographed documents and searched González’s personal belongings.
The mole was identified as Alejandro César Alberto Garofani Mariscal and was discovered red-handed by a colleague, who filmed him while they jointly carried out tasks internationally baptized as TSCM, for the acronym in English for “Technical Surveillance Counter Measures”, which in Spanish means ” Technical Surveillance Countermeasures”.
“Within the framework of the procedure carried out on November 30, 2021, the named Garofani accessed and photographically recorded, stored and sent or shared all kinds of printed information available on desks, drawers, files, waste bins, backpacks, bags, etc. , of the offices where the procedure was carried out, behaviors that obviously were not authorized in any way but, on the contrary, were prohibited and would make up the crimes denounced, “said González in the brief presented through his lawyer.
Complaint
The complaint, which was first published by Noticias Magazine, indicated that Alejandro Garofani “took photographs both with his corporate cell phone and with his personal cell phone, and that these images were stored and/or sent or shared to third parties through his cell phone (since after photographing, he manipulated the cell phone in an attitude of fingerprint writing on the screen; which supports the reasonable suspicion that he transmitted the photos to someone else at the time), circumstances that would lead to the creation of uncontrolled copies of documents containing Sensitive information Non-Public of YPF SA and personal information of the company’s executives, which materializes the exposure of that information.
The Garofani mole didn’t just photograph documents. His surveillance partner also recorded it by pointing his cell phone camera at a portrait in which González’s wife is seen together with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
suspicions
The president of YPF suspected that they were spying on him because he used to find papers mixed up, moved or out of place. In the complaint, he assured that the mole Alejandro Garofani entered his office at the YPF tower in Puerto Madero with the “assistance” of the Department of Physical Security, which executes the TSCM, which is based on searching for microphones or secretly installed espionage devices. Convinced of the illegal maneuvers, González alerted the company’s head of security, Diego Gorgal, who opened an internal investigation that lasted several months. Alejandro Garofani’s corporate cell phone was taken from him and they examined it. They discovered all the evidence and subjected him to a private interrogation to find out who he was acting for. Later, he was fired with cause and without severance pay. Now he was formally charged by Judge Servini. One of the lines of investigation points to a possible traffic of information in the oil industry and that YPF’s competitors or international litigants are the buyers of that Sensitive Non-Public information of the corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The belief is that the “historical line” of YPF preferred to leave the scandal in a simple internal audit and sanction. But after overcoming internal impediments to go to court, the Santa Cruz finally filed a criminal complaint.
Before, he had informed the vice president, who gave an endorsement for everything to be investigated. A few weeks ago González gave all the details of the case to Alberto Fernández. News is expected in the coming days.
Source: Ambito
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