Gustavo Sáenz from Salta is in the spotlight for a million-dollar embezzlement of funds to finance campaigns

Spurious financing of electoral campaigns left Gustavo Sáenz in trouble. The Financial Information Unit ( UIF ) carried out an investigation after detecting millionaire money movements in municipalities of Salta , Catamarca and Tucumán during 2023. These financial diversions correspond to the time of the elections of that year, in which the Governor of Salta competed against the promoter of the Salteño, Sergio Massa .

The UIF, which is in charge of preventing money laundering, detected after a report that “throughout the country, municipalities in different provinces withdrew large sums of cash without economic justification , while in parallel they deposited funds into private accounts of public employees, who in many cases used these deposits to buy MEP dollars ,” according to what El Intra Salta cites. The amount moved reaches the sum of $45,000 million .

There are two pieces of information that indicate the suspicion of irregular movements within the aforementioned modus operandi. On the one hand, although the report analyzes the last two and a half years, the most suspicious and recurrent actions occurred during the months prior to the PASO elections, the national elections, and the provincial elections of 2023. A year in which the provinces also renewed their local offices, with victories for the ruling party in Salta, Tucumán, and Catamarca, the jurisdictions involved.

The other key element is the mechanism by which this diversion of funds occurred. With an exchange rate gap of around 100% , it was common at that time to use the MEP dollar at the official rate to carry out the "rulo" and sell the currencies acquired on the parallel market. This gave the possibility of accessing large sums of money for the difference between both rates. It is suspected that this was one of the maneuvers for which this money diverted by Salta and other Argentine towns was used.

“The preliminary investigation revealed that, on the one hand, large sums of money were leaving these municipalities without any apparent justification and, on the other, those same millions of pesos were deposited into the private accounts of municipal employees - who did not have the capacity to save - who, in many cases, ended up buying MEP dollars,” says the UIF report that was revealed by Infobae.

The truth is that after the agency's report, a complaint was filed with the National Electoral Chamber , which is in charge of overseeing the legal financing of campaigns. The complaint was filed by the Office of the Prosecutor for Economic Crime and Money Laundering ( PROCELAC ) based on data from the UIF. Immediately, the Chamber segmented the information and divided it by districts to decentralize the investigation in each province involved. Therefore, Gustavo Sáenz will have to give answers to the local Justice .