Latin America
Related: About this forumArgentina's Macri pressured newspapers to withhold Panama Papers story from headlines.
Argentine investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, an ally of the right-wing Macri administration, revealed that President Mauricio Macri personally pressured the country's two leading news dailies, the center-right Clarín and the far-right La Nación, to keep the Panama Papers story incriminating him and a number of his friends and family out of the day's headlines on April 3.
Lanata explained in an interview with Ángel de Brito on Channel 13 (a Clarín Group cable channel normally supportive of Macri) that contrary to his assertions the Argentine president knew at least 10 days in advance that the international scandal would be made public, and that his name and those of his associates would appear. "What did Macri do to try to mitigate the impact of the Panama Papers? He called Clarín and La Nación to pressure them into burying the story. La Nación abided; but Clarín did not - hence his current dispute with Clarín."
Macri was discovered to hold at least a dozen offshore shell companies in partnership with his father and other close associates, and was one of only five current heads of government found to have directly used the disgraced Panamanian corporate law firm Mossack Fonseca for such purposes.
Like Macri, both the Clarín Group and La Nación S.A. were found to control undeclared (and thereby illegal) offshore accounts in Panamá.
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.politicargentina.com/notas/201605/13688-lanata-conto-que-el-gobierno-apreto-a-la-nacion-por-los-panama-papers.html&prev=search
Judi Lynn
(160,598 posts)Clarín has stone-walled fascist atrocities for decades. This is really mysterious.
This story is fascinating, forest444. Can't wait to hear how it will evolve.
So glad you found out about it. Thank you.
forest444
(5,902 posts)Their honeymoon with Macri ended, I'd say, around March when it became obvious to everyone that Macri's IMF austerity playbook would be all pain, but no gain.
I'm sure they're happy he rescinded the Media Law with a pen stroke (which, of course, is unconstitutional since that law was passed by Congress). Even so every time they look at him, they can almost hear the helicopter coming - and they don't want to be too close to him when it does.