Kirchner’s private secretary indicted for money laundering

A former top aide to the late President Néstor Kirchner was indicted on Tuesday by a federal prosecutor for allegedly laundering money from Los Olivos presidential residence.

The charges filed against Daniel Muñoz, who served for 20 years as Kirchner’s personal secretary, is the latest corruption scandal to rock the current administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the widow of Argentina’s former leader, in recent weeks.

Muñoz is said to have been the late president’s closest aide and was very influential during his 2003-to-2007 presidency.

The scandal broke when another former Kirchner secretary, Miriam Quiroga, told a television program that she had seen Muñoz “take bags of money of money to Los Olivos and then to Santa Cruz [Kirchner’s native province] by plane or car.” The bags contained euros, she said.

Quiroga’s interview was broadcast May 5 on the highly-rated Sunday night news program Periodismo para todos (Journalism for everyone or PPT), hosted by controversial journalist Jorge Lanata on a television station owned by the powerful Clarín media group.

-“Did you at any time see people carrying cash, at the government house or Los Olivos, or if they came out with something?” Lanata asked Quiroga.

-“What I saw were bags. I saw people, different strange movements, and later a co-worker told me: ‘Here, hold one, look how heavy it is.’ ‘How much do you think there is?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, but a lot of money.’ And then I said: ‘Give me some.’ He told me: ‘I can’t; they are carefully counted.’ Then I saw them in the hands of Daniel Muñoz.”

She described the former secretary as Kirchner’s “double” – a powerful person who had the president’s complete trust.

His widow, President Fernández de Kirchner, had not made any public comments about Muñoz’s charges.

According to La Nación, the 53-year-old former secretary Muñoz now works as a business consultant. Just weeks after Kirchner left office, Muñoz publicly registered two companies dedicated to transportation and real estate – DS Mayer and Prox-SRL – with partner Gregorio Sebastián Ludman.

Rumors of money laundering during the Kirchner administration have grown in recent years. But prosecutors began to take them seriously after an April 14 broadcast of the PPT show, in which witnesses made hidden camera confessions that they had laundered some 55 million euros in tax havens for the president on behalf of his friend, millionaire builder Lázaro Báez. The witnesses, Leonardo Fariña and Federico Elasker, later denied those allegations, and said their testimony was part of a show that Lanata had set up.

On May 3, Báez was indicted for money laundering.

Lanata later broadcast interviews with people who claimed that both Báez and Kirchner had underground safes at their homes in Santa Cruz.