Former IDB president accused Argentine president of dishonesty

The former Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) president accused the Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, of being dishonest and only wanting to help his “three friends of the gang”.

Mauricio Claver-Carone, former president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), aimed Alberto Fernandez by branding him as “dishonest”, alleging that during his tenure at the IDB, the only interest of the Argentine president was to get his advisor, Gustavo Beliz, a job.

“I was an inconvenient person for them, and Argentina had from the first day a great effort to get me out of my job,” Claver-Carone said in an interview with Radio Mitre. “Theirs was always a policy of destruction,” he said.

“In the three years I worked with Alberto Fernández, I never had a single conversation about how to support Argentina as a country to generate jobs, growth, and development in the country.

“The conversations were always about how to get Gustavo Beliz a job,” Claver-Carone said. “It was a job search program for one person,” he stated in an ironizing tone.

“When I got elected, I wanted to appoint an apolitical Argentine, a competent finance person, to an important position. But they were still committed to Beliz.

“I told Fernandez that I would appoint a very capable Argentine who is apolitical and Alberto Fernandez told me: ‘I am not going to vote for anyone who is not one of mine’.

“I didn’t understand that. It shocked me a lot,” emphasized the Spanish-American lobbyist who had been appointed to head the institution by Donald Trump but was removed by Biden.

Claver-Carone was the first American to preside over the Inter-American Bank, controlled by North America but always led by a Latin American.

However, during his presidency, Trump, tired of the IDB financing socialist regimes in the region, pressured and managed to place one of his own in this position.

He lasted two years; he went through the pandemic successfully but was finally ousted by Joe Biden and a media operation that tried to discredit him.

Currently, a Honduran woman close to the Democratic Party, Reina Irene Mejia, is interim president of the Bank in charge of granting loans for infrastructure.

“I believe in ideological honesty, respect leftist people, and understand how leftist people like Cristina Kirchner think. But I don’t understand Alberto Fernandez and that group because they are dishonest,” said the former IDB head.

Nevertheless, the Republican separated Sergio Massa from Alberto and rescued his intentions as Minister of Economy, saying he was the first and only Argentinean official who showed himself genuinely concerned about the local situation, clarifying further that Massa “talked to him like an adult”.

“He did not talk to me about cronyism, only about his plan to try to stop the crisis,” he pointed out. “I must support Argentina if it comes with a plan, even if it is incoherent. And I responded as it should be.”

And he concluded: “But you cannot support if in two years they spend two years playing political games, working for the three friends of Alberto Fernández’s gang and not for the millions of Argentines”.

With information from Derecha Diario