Venezuelan Argentina suitcase scandal: there was an additional USD 4.2 million

Politics Following the resumption of the Miami's trial in the suitcase scandal, Venezuelan businessman Guido Antonini Wilson declared that there was indeed additional USD 4.2 million targeted at Argentina. During his testimony, he mentioned Diego Uzcátegui, the former chair of state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa) in Argentina. Antonini Wilson said that shortly after being caught with the suitcase filled with USD 800,000 in cash, Uzcátegui asked him about the additional amount of USD 4.2 million. Therefore, it was confirmed that the plane carried more money than the cash seized in the Argentinean airport. Antonini Wilson also stated that Argentinean businessman Claudio Uberti invited him to talk about the plans to lay a gas pipeline from Venezuela to Argetina.  Antonini Wilson, a US-Venezuelan citizen living in Miami, arrived in Buenos Aires on August 4, 2007, with the controversial suitcase in his hands. However, it seems that the cash did not belong to him but to Pdvsa, as evidenced in the ongoing trial in Miami.  In his first appearance at the lawsuit on Tuesday, Antonini Wilson gave testimony at the Miami courthouse.

The suitcase affair was brought about by a war between Argentinean officials. Businessman Guido Antonini said that the defendant Franklin Durán was poor in 1991. Politics The suitcase scandal has become a serial novel in which every minute of the recordings has a different approach.  The defendants have talked about the way to close the case in Argentina, about documents or about the money that Venezuelan-American businessman Guido Antonini Wilson would have charged to remain silent. But they have also made reference to more prosaic and trivial topics, from where to buy large clothes (the overweight Moisés Maionica and Alejandro Antonini is proverbial), to the girlfriend of Venezuelan businessman Franklin Durán, the three million dollars that Antonini earned in 2006, his Italian origin, or Maionica's confession: "I am a corporate lawyer and this is the first time in my life that I do anything like that."  On November 30, 2007, Antonini (AA) and Maionica (MM) held a conversation in which he recounted how he met Franklin Durán, his future partner and friend. That was almost two decades ago, when Durán was the boyfriend of the daughter of one Antonini's partner, far from the times of the private aircraft and Ferrari luxury cars that Durán enjoyed before his arrest last December.  AA - "I met Franklin in 1990 or 1991. He was the boyfriend of the daughter of my partner, who has a big transportation company in the central part of the country. Then, Durán was dating the daughter of my associate, who did not like Franklin because he was poor. "That is life!" Somebody introduced him to me and I was selling off a business that belonged to my father. I invited him to stay at my house in the Colonia Tovar," Antonini said. "He came and went because it was Easter time and he had no money. He was a poor boy. I never saw him again."
Later, Maionica explains his conversation with the oil executive Ángel Morales (who replaced Diego Uzcátegui as the head of the state-run oil subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, Pdvsa Sur). Apparently, Morales mentioned a "retaliation" of the group headed by Julio De Vido (the Argentinean Minister for Federal Planning) to the group headed by Claudio Uberti (to whom the Argentinean opposition parties call "the cashier of the Kirchners.") "I had a two-hour meeting with Morales and he told me: "Moisés, I think that in the problem faced by Alejandro, there was a retaliation planned by the De Vido's group against Uberti aimed at removing Uberti and, on the other hand, to ask Diego to quit. "It was retaliation."