RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Another search has been conducted at the C5N television station in Argentina, whose reporting is considered critical of the government. In the process, police officers of the Buenos Aires Fraud Department, acting under a court order, confiscated accounting records.
The operation was carried out as part of an investigation into alleged fraud in the 2015 purchase of the Ámbito Financiero newspaper by the two owners of the television station, Cristóbal López and Fabián De Sousa.
However, critics regard the search as an attempt by president Mauricio Macri‘s government to intimidate one of the country’s few opposition media. The renowned Argentinian television moderator Víctor Hugo Morales commented on the incident in his program El Diario: “The government’s attacks on C5N persist. It’s not enough for them to lock up the owners; the very existence of C5N is bothering them.”
Gustavo Dossena, General Manager of C5N until October 2018 and currently in charge of handling the group’s bankrupt companies, commented on the current affair to America21:
“This time, the search was not carried out at the request of the judiciary, but by a private claimant, although sanctioned by the judiciary. Nevertheless, we see it as one of the many ‘messages’ that the judiciary has been consistently conveying over the past two years. This is wholly political. They want to display photos of the imprisoned owners and bankrupt companies to the public. The tax authorities, the judiciary, and mainstream media are against us.”
C5N, like some other opposition media, is part of the consortium Grupo Ceibo (formerly Grupo Indalo). Cristóbal López and Fabián De Sousa own it. López has been active in the automotive and oil industries since the nineties.
When he acquired C5N in 2012, he also began to invest in the media sector. Both López and Sousa have been in custody since December 2017.
In mid-June of this year, a legal proceeding was initiated against them, in which they face charges of tax fraud. They are accused of not having paid a total of eight billion pesos (around US$185 million) in taxes between 2013 and 2015 on their company Oil Combustibles, which is part of the consortium.
Ricardo Echegaray, the former head of the AFIP tax authority, is a codefendant. The prosecution alleges he facilitated the tax evasion. In May 2018, López and Sousa’s lawyer Carlos Alberto Beraldi suspected that the legal proceedings were based on a political attempt to silence C5N and the consortium’s radio channels, which were critical of the government.
According to Beraldi, in addition to members of the government, president Macri had personally exerted pressure on judges and prosecutors to arrest López and Sousa.
Various plans submitted by the company to settle the tax debt had been rejected at the urging of the government and the president. This was intended to bring about insolvency and drive the entire consortium, including C5N, into bankruptcy.
Cristóbal López is known as an entrepreneur close to leftist former president Kirchner. Since Mauricio Macri took office in December 2015, C5N and other media in his consortium have been vigorously opposed to the government.
As such, they represent a major counterfoil to the dominance of the so-called “hegemonic” media in Argentina, the vast majority of which openly support the government.