The entrepreneurs behind the emptying of the traditional Boston Confectionery They were accused of fraudulent bankruptcy and the Justice prohibited them from leaving the country, at least until they appear to testify in March.
The accusation, made by prosecutor David Bruna, falls on the last owners of the Boston, the brothers Juan Manuel and Pablo Lotero and the austrians Carl Ludwig y Aston Schonfeldt and the previous shareholders of the firm Pastelera Tecomar SA, owner of the Boston brand.
In the midst of a labor dispute – with the takeover by the workers of the Boston confectionery, subsequent eviction and finally permission to exploit the place – who was the lawyer of the Gastronomic Union, Osvaldo Verdi, criminally denounced the Lotero brothers and the rest of the businessmen for the crime of “fraudulent bankruptcy, fraud aggravated by emptying the company, and fraudulent insolvency, all in ideal competition.”
Is that, for the lawyer, the defendants were responsible for emptying the company and making fraudulent sales of its assets, without entering the assets of the company. According to this hypothesis, when the businessmen emptied the company, they left it bankrupt and without anything of value, to later open another corporation and exploit the same resources.
In mid-2020, the head of Civil and Commercial Court No. 16, Sara Gunsberg, resolved the “bankruptcy with employment continuity” of the Boston firm and allowed the workers to continue their activities in the two premises that “survived” the emptying: Buenos Aires Street and Constitución Avenue.
Parallel to this resolution of the Civil and Commercial Court, criminally progress was made in the fraud investigation and the eight indicted businessmen -among which are the Lotero brothers, two Austrians and the previous owners- were summoned to testify for the first days of March and, until that instance arrives, the Justice ordered that they cannot leave the country so as not to hinder the cause.
Emptying and fraud
In 2016, the Lotero brothers and Austrian businessmen formed the new group of shareholders of the firm Pastelera Tecomar SA, owner of the Boston confectioneries.
As stated in the case, on April 19, 2017, with the signature of Juan Manuel Lotero as president of the company, they sold the premises of Buenos Aires 1927, Avenida Constitución corner Manuela Pedraza and Avenida Constitución 4680 for the sum of five hundred thousand dollars (US $ 500,000) and hid that income from the assets of the company, which was already in the process of competition.
In addition, according to the indictment, the defendants “did not justify” owning the brand “Confiteria Boston” and it appears that on March 23, 2018 – the preventive contest being already open – it had been acquired by the company Compañía Latinoamericana de Pastas (one of the shareholders of Pastelera Tecomar SA) from the hands of the previous shareholders. In other words, the previous owners of Confiteria Boston had bought the brand again, only to sell it to another company after a few months: Compañía de Inversiones Limitada de Chile.
“In this way, maliciously the successive members of the firm Pastelera Tecomar SA made the assets that made up the firm’s assets disappear, and in turn frustrated in this way the obligations arising from the labor files”, concludes the prosecutor Bruna.
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