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They sue two SGR for fraudulent maneuvers that would exceed $12,000 million

They sue two SGR for fraudulent maneuvers that would exceed $12,000 million

The complaint was filed by the attorney Augustine Esnal that represents two individuals and two other legal entities allegedly affected. The case is processed in the Economic Criminal Court No. 9 in charge of Judge Javier López Biscayart. According to the lawyer, the penalties that could apply to those involved, in case they are found guilty of “fraudulent omission of information” and “falsified balance sheets”, reach six years in prison.

The denounced companies had already been suspended by Argentine Stock Exchanges and Markets SA (BYMA) in June 2022, when unpaid checks for amounts greater than $500 million were detected. These instruments were issued and exchanged in the market by companies that the victims consider “ghosts”, since they had little time of existence, no commercial activity, did not have employees and repeated their corporate composition.

The SGRs refused to cover the guaranteed instruments and stopped paying interest or returning the contributions to their investors. After a series of attempts by creditors to move forward with the recovery, at the end of last month Intergarantías presented the Creditors’ Preventive Bankruptcy before the Commercial Court 17, the opening of which has not yet been ordered. Therefore, all actions of patrimonial content were suspended.

“SMEs invest in SGRs because they are regulated by the market and the State. With the scam that many companies suffered, we lost a large part of our capital. In some cases, the patrimonial damage casts doubt on the continuity of the firms”, explained to Ámbito a businessman who has not yet been able to recover his investment and who is also facing the curious situation that the tax authorities demand payment of profits for a interest that was never collected.

Complaint SGR (SGR – Canosa)-compressed.pdf

The maneuver

According to sources consulted by Ambit, The maneuver was carried out through several firms without commercial activity or employees that obtained the guarantee of the defendant SGRs to issue checks and financial instruments that were later exchanged in the Stock Market at a discount rate. By having the guarantee, the market delivered cash to these “ghost” companies hoping to cash the checks when they expired.

As they were guaranteed, the checks had to be covered by the drawing company or by the SGR. However, as of June 2022, all financial instruments began to be rejected for not having funds and both Interguarantees and Interavales refused to answer for them, despite being legally bound.

The complainants consider that the excess of the operating limit and the irregularities of the guarantees were “deliberately silenced by the authorities of the SGR, the trustees, the external auditor and by the risk rating agency that in July 2021 gave those involved a rating of “A+”.

the fraud

The suspicion of the victims is that the conduct of the SGR and the libradoras is not only culpable, but also willful. According to the complaint, a group of “family companies and groups of friends” concentrated the bulk of the risk of the two firms, more than $5.2 billion.

From a detailed corporate analysis that this medium was able to access, it emerges that eight companies backed by some $2,000 million share the corporate composition. The only thing that varies is the role that each one occupies in the board of directors. An important fact is that, in this first group, the surnames are repeated: they are familiar.

A second set, with similar characteristics, repeated its corporate composition six times and concentrated more than $1.7 billion. Then there is another family that obtained guarantees for three firms for more than $760 million despite “almost no activity of any kind.”

This set of irregularities is what makes the whistleblowers suspect that the objective was never to obtain financing for small and medium-sized companies, but that the business was to raise the funds and then default on their obligations. The fall of these two SGR affects dozens of SMEs, savers and institutions that had invested funds, uncashed checks also harm the financial market as a whole.

Source: Ambito

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