Negotiations at INDER and the controversial management of Alberto Fernandez as head of the Insurance Superintendence

Former President Alberto Fernandez was Superintendent of Insurance under former President Carlos Menem, has a deep knowledge of the insurance and reinsurance underworld and was in the middle of the frustrated attempt to liquidate the National Reinsurance Institute (INDER), one of the corruption knots in Argentina.

After his management of that strategic agency in the nineties, several of his collaborators were prosecuted -although they were finally acquitted- for irregularities and that time in the public administration and even provoked the censorship of an article by journalist Julio Nudler in Página 12.

Between 1989 and 1995, Alberto was Superintendent of Insurance of the Nation, after holding a minor position in the Ministry of Economy during Raúl Alfonsín's administration.

He was the head of the agency in charge of controlling the insurance market until six months before the resignation of the Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo on July 26, 1996 due to his quarrels with Menem.

During that period Alberto was also president of the Association of Latin American Insurance Superintendents between 1989 and 1992, co-founder of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors and ALADI Insurance expert.

Cavallo tried to privatize INDER but Congress rejected it and then decided to intervene to liquidate it. In the process, he appointed Roberto Guzmán as the intervener. But the economist of the Mediterranea Foundation, known for his hyper-honesty, could not liquidate it because new alleged debts of INDER with private insurance companies had been generated.

Cavallo then hired former prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and his partner Hugo Wortman Jofré to investigate the internal corruption. At the beginning, "Alberto was elusive" in the internal investigation, judicial sources told Clarín . In addition, one of his sisters was a legal advisor to INDER, which - on the other hand - was a "politician's box" with a board of directors made up of eight politicians and officials.

But months later, Alberto "collaborated" with Moreno Ocampo and Wortam and a criminal complaint was filed against those companies before Judge Jorge Urso, who after several comings and goings ended up, over the years, allowing the acquittal of the accused.

However, Cavallo continued to support Roberto Guzmán and even wrote a prologue to his book entitled "Saqueo Asegurado, la corrupción en el negocio de los seguros y el caso Salta" (Assured Pillage, corruption in the insurance business and the Salta case) published in 1997.

In that introduction, the former minister affirms that INDER was "one of the organizations most invaded by corruption and business deals in hyper-regulated Argentina". He assured that after two years of operation of a Liquidation Commission of INDER -before Guzmán's administration- "the apparent debt of the organization had quadrupled". Guzmán was INDER's liquidator between 1994 and 1996.

He said that Guzman "was perplexed when he told us (in 1996) that he was astonished by the stagnation of judicial cases full of condemnatory evidence, enough to put behind bars a good number of officials, lobbyists and public officials of great renown".

Guzman reveals in detail how the "trial industry" against INDER worked and gives as an example a car crash in La Rioja in 1983, where the victim was paid 14 thousand dollars and the lawyers and experts -linked to a Menemist official- who intervened ended up being paid 1,400,000 dollars.

In 2004, the late journalist Julio Nudler, tried to publish in Página 12 the article entitled "Puppets and Puppeteers" about the appointment of Claudio Moroni to the Sindicatura General de la Nación (Sigen). The K newspaper did not allow him to do so because it described an alleged "business network" between Moroni and Alberto Fernández when both were numbers one and two in the National Superintendence of Insurance.

According to Nudler -who denounced censorship by the pro-government newspaper and was harshly criticized by the K journalist Horacio Verbitsky-, between 1994 and 1996 they pressured Guzmán to "acknowledge a debt with the insurance sector of 1,200 million dollars, when later Guzmán himself proved that it was only 500 million dollars".

The note is also related to the so-called "Intelisano Case".

Juan Intelisano was an official in the Ministry of Economy and was prosecuted for having authorized a payment of $ 54 million to a group of insurance companies that had claimed that amount from the former Caja Nacional de Ahorro y Seguros , which was privatized in the 90s.

Intelisano, who was Undersecretary of Administration and Patrimonial Normalization of the Ministry of Economy, released those millions in 2007 and for that reason he was indicted in June 2010 by the then federal judge and current member of the Supreme Court of Justice of Buenos Aires Sergio Torres together with other former officials and the businessmen who participated in the maneuver.

There are other cases where the management of Alberto and his collaborators at the head of that superintendence was investigated. In 2017, for example, federal judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral indicted Claudio Moroni for the crime of breach of the duties of a public official due to the lack of control of the alleged emptying of the company Sudamérica Compañía de Seguros de Vida Patrimoniales S.A (SAVIDA).

In the case before Canicoba Corral there were several insurance companies under investigation in separate files. What is being investigated in each case is the alleged emptying of the companies through the creation of parallel companies of the same group to which the portfolio of policyholders was transferred, but not the claims. As a result, hundreds of policyholders who suffered accidents were left without the backing of the original company. Moroni was eventually acquitted.

And now, seven years later, Alberto Fernandez is again being investigated in a corruption case in the insurance world for allegedly having encouraged the introduction of intermediaries in the State's insurance business during his presidential administration.

Paradoxically, INDER -an emblematic case of corruption in the insurance world and after Guzmán's death- 30 years later "still could not finish being liquidated", said the judicial source with resignation.