Roberto Baratta's iPhone reactivates the worst nightmare for the K: the case of the Bribery Notebooks

The paper is official. It has no letterhead. It is incorporated into one of the “related” cases of a larger file, submitted largely to oral and public trial, the mega-case of corruption known as the Bribery Notebooks.

The report, dated November 1st, lists a series of new tests of disturbing expertise: experts from the police forces managed to extract the contents of an iPhone brand cell phone that was in the name of an absolute protagonist of this story, the former undersecretary of Control and Coordination of the Ministry of Federal Planning, Roberto Baratta. Evidence emerges from this apparatus that supports the basis of the judicial investigation and demolishes the story of the K defenses, which tried to establish that the file and the Notebooks was in fact a set up based on falsehoods with manipulated and even invented data.

According to the defendants in this case, Roberto Baratta's driver in Federal Planning, Oscar Centeno, never wrote the famous notebooks in which he detailed the trips and tours with Baratta in search of millionaire bribes in dollars, which they transferred from businessmen's offices who paid those bribes, even the Olivos Presidential Residence (RPO), among other destinations such as a private apartment of the Kirchner family in the Recoleta neighborhood.

"It's the cause of the photocopies," Baratta attacked several times, stating that the taxi driver's writings were false, and had been written to harm him in court. The same argument was used by the main defendant in the larger file, today Vice President Cristina Kichner, prosecuted for being considered the leader of an illicit association created to use the State to collect millions of dollars in bribes.

iPhone data

The expertise on Baratta's telephone detected that the latter knew of the existence of the Bribery Notebooks since at least May 11, 2017, more than a year before the notebooks with bribery collection annotations came to light. on August 1, 2018.

The one who revealed to him that secret job that his driver did, and that he was unaware of, was Centeno's ex-partner, Hilda Horovitz, who communicated with Baratta to ask for money in exchange for keeping quiet about what she knew about this silver story of irregular origin.

The first message that Baratta received in which Horovitz warns him about the notebooks, reads as follows: “He had or has notebooks written with everything where they had addresses, photos, etc. You are in the Mapuche cantry, I know that with what I send you, I send you things that put me in trouble with Oscar”. The misspelled message is as written by Horovitz.

Baratta received it at 3:14 p.m. on May 11, 2017.

There were more details of the former taxi driver. On May 15, 2017, at 12:16 p.m., she wrote to Baratta that she wanted to tell her more details about the notebooks that would later be her greatest legal misfortune and would affect a good part of the K officials of the last administration of Cristina Kirchner and herself. .

"Hello! Good day. He wanted to tell her why Oscar wrote everything they did and when they went to the cave with date and time and photo. Because he said that when he finished the administration if you kicked him he would use what he wrote. I asked him to build a mezzanine, he told me that he will see when he gives me. I already sent him a budget better than everything”, was the textual message of Horovitz.

Baratta, as was said, made countless public statements affirming that Centeno's notebooks did not exist, that everything on which the first judge in the case, the late Claudio Bonadio, and especially the prosecutor Carlos Stornelli, had relied to arrest former officials and businessmen who participated in this system of illegal collection, as they themselves confessed thanks to the work of the Public Ministry, was a kind of script mounted on "photocopies" of a fictional story.

That defense hypothesis, which spread among other defendants and was even used by the vice president, entered into a chronological conflict.

The case of the Cuadernos de las Coimas had a surprising start that caused a stir in K. by Bonadio and Stornelli.

He, Cabot, had been the first to have contact with the notebooks, which were given to him by a friend of Centeno's to whom he entrusted them as a receipt without telling him what he was giving him. That person, former police officer Jorge Bacigalupo, could not stand his curiosity and opened the parcel of his old acquaintance Centeno. When he read their contents he was outraged and handed them over to Cabot, whom he knew by sight because they had lived in the same neighborhood.

That delivery of the material was made on January 8, 2018.

Cabot studied the annotations and, given the notion of the magnitude of the material that he had already scanned and reviewed a thousand times, he gave it to Stornelli and Bonadio who worked in secret until the case was made public and did not stop generating unique news. in the judicial history of Argentina.

Powerful businessmen confessed to having paid the bribes that former powerful officials admitted to having collected.

The evidence continues to emerge in this plot, now from Baratta's expert phone.

How can he maintain that the notebooks were photocopies or never existed if he knew, through Horovitz, about those annotations in the message she sent him on May 11, 2017? It was only in January of the following year that Cabot obtained the notebooks that he later returned to Bacigalupo.

Centeno, said that witness in the case, asked him for the box that he had given him insistently and nervously. After a month of comings and goings, he returned the saved material to his friend who drove his driver, who realized that the box in which he had kept everything was open.

Baratta, and all the rest of the defendants K could not further argue that Cabot's testimony and the first steps taken by Stornelli and Bonadio were taken after reading them in "photocopies".

The iPhone of one of the most influential officials in Federal Planning revealed more alert messages sent to that private line by Centeno's ex.

She insisted on how the taxi driver had recorded all the details of the money collection by hand, once again, in a communication dated May 22, 2017: “Oscar said that these bags brought the Stolen Dollars from a cave. And that you gave him crumbs, these are some of the bags because he took many to Bartolomé Miter's house and here in Olivos...”, and after telling him about some real estate investment of his ex, he questions and questions his interlocutor: “How a vice minister's driver can do so much?”, he put it verbatim.

According to the experts' report on Baratta's cell phone, Centeno's ex sent the former official more than twenty-three images, among which photos of the bags with which they collected hundreds of thousands of dollars would stand out.

The exchange of messages between Horovitz and Baratta imply that she pressures the former official to get money in exchange for help, it is still unknown exactly what and if she actually tried to save the former Federal Planning from all this.

The Justice verified, according to sources in the file, that Baratta was in fact in charge of buying an apartment from Horovitz in the neighborhood of Once on Urquiza street that was remodeled and redecorated.

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What happened to Centeno to decide to leave the notebooks in the hands of his friend Bacigalupo? Baratta already knew that he had written them and wanted to shut him up?

Why did Centeno unexpectedly go to see his old friend, a former police officer, to ask her to return that valuable box?

The questions continue: why did Centeno assure the Justice that he had the original notebooks but when he searched his house they were not found and later declared before Judge Bonadio that he had burned them?

Cabot, in the midst of the political and judicial scandal generated by this mega-cause, received a call from an unknown person. In October 2019, in Vicente López, a man with whom he had never exchanged a word handed him the six original notebooks that he had already had in his hands in 2018.

Baratta's cell phone could help solve part of this still unfinished story.

Baratta's iPhone also extracted a voice message that he would have exchanged with Horovitz, who at all times pressured him to ask for money to prevent her from telling the truth.

Horovitz went to court. He filed a complaint about Centeno in the Bonadio court. But it was in a case prior to that of the Coimas Notebooks. That file investigated the possible payment of surcharges in the purchase of liquefied gas by Federal Planning. Bonadio took test measures in this regard but they did not reach any certainty or any clue.

Centeno's ex had told Baratta the truth that she would go to court if she did not receive financial help from him.

The technological expertise on Baratta's iPhone is just the beginning of many more similar tests that surprisingly update the plot of the most relevant corruption case in national history.

The main accused of committing and commanding the crimes of collecting bribes from businessmen is Cristina Kirchner.

She tried to stop the progress of this file several times. She managed to get higher courts to reject several lawsuits that she had in related cases.

Now the past returns. There is more evidence of unknown skills in this criminal history, which she does not want to be judged in an oral court.

"A file is unstoppable," the late Bonadio used to say. “You know how it starts, old man, but you never know how it ends”, he let out, laughing.

Prosecutor Stornelli, after his work persuading businessmen and former officials or former private secretaries of the current vice president whom he managed to convince to collaborate with the Justice as "repentant", ended up being investigated in a Dolores court after the presentation of a extortion complaint against him.

In the original brief, the complainant states that his claim was "against the investigators of the Cuadernos de las Coimas Case."

Inquiries into the K collection continued. And, as is now known with the revelation of just a fraction of the contents of the iPhone once used by Baratta, the file continues to grow with more evidence.

The vice president attacked the press that she initiated this case personally: she said of Cabot that she was part of a task force.

And she insisted that the notebooks were actually photocopies. Her lawyers should read the latest in the case. There will be many more.

The situation of the prosecutor Carlos Stornelli

In full investigation of the case of the Cuadernos de las Coimas, prosecutor Carlos Stornelli was denounced in a Dolores court for alleged extortion and for working with the false lawyer and alleged spy named Marcelo D'alessio.

That cause was driven by a good part of those processed in the Record of the Notebooks. Stornelli has now obtained new testimonies that favor his position.

Vice President Cristina Kirchner herself criticized him on several occasions in public statements. And even the program Periodismo Para Todos, on Channel 13, hosted by Jorge Lanata, broadcast recordings from the Ezeiza prison in which, before the complaint was filed in Dolores against him, the friends of the Kirchnerist power who were detained there They were already elucubrating on that subject. Did they know in advance that the complaint would be filed? Stornelli was also pressured to resign by several K leaders.

The prosecutor continues his work. Now without Judge Claudio Bonadio who passed away. But with other colleagues and new judges who feed even more, and still, the story of Oscar Centeno's notebooks.

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