Did Vicentin have insurance against damage to his assets? Did the insured values correspond to actual valuations, or were they under or overvalued? And about their debts, had they taken out so-called “default insurance”? The multimillion-dollar figures that could be at stake behind these contracts acquire relevance at this moment of the bankruptcy because Vicentin did not present that information for the knowledge of the creditors at the time of submitting to the call; the bankruptcy judge requested it in January last year, but the company never responded, without the magistrate or forensic auditors having subsequently claimed it. The issue of insurance on credits and physical assets was refloated as a result of the claim of the overseers appointed by the creditors, who in a note addressed to the judge pointed out the lack of information in this regard and the dangerous inaction of the court, behind which It could be configured a serious damage for creditors, in addition to “the existence of a possible commission of criminal offenses of public action.” In this regard, they requested the hiring of an external audit to search for information that, until now, the forensic body is not even looking for.
The lack of information provided to the preventive bankruptcy by Vicentin SAIC on the insurances contracted on the assets and debts of the company could become another stone in the scandal of the already murky call process. The observers Juan José López Forastier and Sergio Juan Arelovich presented a note to Judge Lorenzini on March 10, in which they reminded him that in his resolution of January 13, 2020 he had claimed the “control of the insurance and protection policy of the assets of the company, evaluation of the over or undervaluation, determining the subscription of the policies with solvent insurers. Evaluation of the insurance on third party merchandise and the ART “. But they add that “the Forensic Auditors have let us know that the topic is not part of the work program that they have drawn up.”
They immediately point out, in the same note to the judge, that “it would eventually be detrimental to the progress of this bankruptcy process and to the continuity of the company to neglect said issue,” highlighting “the importance of having the details of all the contracted insurance “.
Why would such information about the insurances contracted and not declared before the contest be so important? The note from the observers suggests the questions that such documentation could answer:
1) Verification of the correspondence of the sums insured with the real values of the assets of the company will make it possible to know if the assets of the group are properly covered in order to effectively guarantee the assets that are safeguarded by the creditors of the bankruptcy.
2) Verify if there are claims pending collection from the date prior to the bankruptcy and what are the reasons for the delay in settlement, for the purposes of crediting the corresponding compensation before the credits expire.
3) Verify if there were life insurance contracts with a single premium that favor the Directors and Shareholders of the company, since with these mechanisms we have seen in our country one of the windows used for the Formation of External Assets, this is flight of foreign exchange abroad.
4) Verify if the bankrupt has made contracts exclusively on its assets and that assets of other companies belonging to the group and not bankrupt have not been insured, thereby avoiding the undue generation of expenses.
In addition, the observers warn in their note that the lack of information on the insurance contracted could be hiding, in addition, “the existence of a possible commission of criminal offenses of public action”, without specifying what facts they refer to.
Page 12 he asked the opinion of the lawyer Gustavo Feldman, legal representative of the Grassi group, the main individual commercial creditor in the contest, who pointed out that “what was exposed by the veedores is unusual and serious; the contest judge himself fails to comply with his resolution of January 10 that ordered the survey of the entire Insurance issue. The judge speaks there of possible under and overvaluations. The veedores presented a forceful brief in which they speak of crimes of public action and suggest an external audit. The trustees have not said anything and the forensic auditors They say that “it is not part of their work project” to investigate the matter; that is, they look the other way. ”
Feldman, who on behalf of the Grassi group is promoting a case against Vicentin in the Rosario Regional Prosecutor’s Office for alleged illicit association and fraud, made an even more serious warning. “I believe that the concealment of the issue arises from the fact that Vicentin, at the time of the” financial stress “and the default (December 2019), and later entered bankruptcy, had and still has a credit insurance policy in force with a foreign insurer first line. It has hidden this in the bankruptcy and the mass of creditors, and it is a policy that covers the insolvency in which the company has fallen. It is even possible that some non-payments of debt abroad have been covered (that is, that is, the insurance canceled the debt), and this was not made known in the contest either. Another example of Vicentin’s deceptive behavior “.
That the company responsible for the most scandalous private default in Argentine economic history had contracted default insurance and had not declared it, escapes any logical reflection. If the existence of the insurance policy mentioned by the lawyer Feldman were confirmed and the scam was proven even against public bodies, as the note by the observers Arelovich and Forastier seems to suggest (they spoke of possible “criminal offenses of public action”), I would be taking out the last piece of the “jenga” that the Vicentin cause has become: a tower in which a mega exporting company is set up that is dismantling piece by piece and seems always on the verge of definitively losing its stability.
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