the shadow of espionage reached YPFthe main oil company in Argentina, and the event occurred around the company’s most important authority: its president, Paul Gonzalez.
This case, which is processed in the Federal Court No. 1 in charge of Maria Servini, It began in November 2021 and, until now, was kept a secret, even within the company itself.
YPF, like other large companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has security protocols that involve, among other things, counterintelligence tasks. This procedure, which has been carried out since February 2021, is called TSCM, from the acronym in English “Technical Surveillance Counter Measures”, which in Spanish means “technical surveillance countermeasures”. The task is to detect if there are microphones or other devices installed that serve to monitor a person. But in that search, one of the employees in charge of raking the possible microphones discovered that his partner in that task, Alexander Garofani, took pictures and checked the drawers in the office of the president of YPF Pablo González. The employee who noticed the maneuver was working with an Oscor Green brand spectrum analyzer and decided to film his partner while he checked the drawers and photographed the papers on González’s desk. The mole also took photos of a portrait in which González’s wife is with Cristina Kirchner, that is, a personal photo.
According to the brief presented in the federal courts of Commodore Py“the TSCM procedure was carried out monthly since February 2021 under the supervision of the appointed Garofani No news of interest has been reported. There is a milestone that stands out and that is that Garofani worked for a company in a dependency relationship called Applicant, which provided services to YPF, but since November 2021 he began to work in a dependency relationship with the national oil company. Namely: Garofani was already in charge of the search round of microphones, but after the change in his employment status, according to the letter, something changed.
“In the framework of the procedure carried out on November 30, 2021, the appointed Garofani agreed and photographically recorded, stored and sent or shared all kinds of printed information available in the desks, drawers, files, cabinets, waste bins, backpacks, bags, etc., of the offices where the procedure was carried out, conduct that, obviously, , in no way were they authorized but, on the contrary, they were prohibited and would conform to the reported crimes, ”adds the letter.
In several passages of the presentation it is highlighted that the stolen information was “sensitive and not public” and that “by taking advantage of the TSCM procedure and, therefore, of access to the offices (which are locked outside working hours since which is only accessed at that time with the assistance of the Department of Physical Security to execute the TSCM procedure), the defendant here photographed printed documents and accessed sensitive information improperly and illegally.
The complaint is thorough when describing the attitude of the mole. “It was noted that the defendant here took photographs both with his corporate cell phone and with his private cell phone, and that these images were stored and/or sent or shared to third parties through his cell phone (because after taking pictures he manipulated the cell phone in attitude of fingerprinting on the screen; which supports the reasonable suspicion that he transmitted the photos to someone else at the time), circumstances that would lead to the creation of uncontrolled copies of documents containing Sensitive information Non-public of YPF SA and personal information of the company’s executives, which materializes the exposure of that information,” Pablo González’s lawyer wrote.
the president of YPF He had already been suspecting that things on his desk used to be moved and that was why he had alerted the company’s head of security, Diego Gorgal. It was Gorgal who told González what was happening and from there, the president of YPF continued with the consultations to advance with an internal investigation and then denounce the situation in Justice.
Maneuvers. From that moment on, Gonzalez He would have encountered a series of obstacles to moving forward with the case. The historical line of the company refused to make the complaint and preferred that everything remain within the framework of an internal sanction. Garofani had two phones, one of his own and the other of the company, so part of the internal investigation was resolved by auditing the company’s own phone and the same progress was made by confronting the unfaithful employee. Who was the information for? Garofani explainedhe delivered the material to the then manager of Brian Cybersecurity O’Durnin, who no longer works for the company. A striking fact: in April of this year, O’Durnin left the company, after 38 years of seniority, with a millionaire compensation and opened a consulting firm specialized in cybersecurity. The fate of Garofani was different, who, when he was discovered, had only been in a dependent relationship for a few days.
Were there other recipients of the stolen information? At this point they work in the Servini court. One of the lines of investigation points to a possible traffic of information in the oil industry and that YPF’s competitors are the buyers of that material.
Another possibility is that the company’s own historical line exerts a secret control over the president and that they keep him monitored to anticipate the vagaries of politics or to block any attempt to go against the interests of those who consider themselves “permanent plant”. ”.
The possibility that they spied on González just for being a Kirchnerist is also being considered, because Garofani has made posts against Kirchnerism on his social networks.
Judge María Servini received this complaint in mid-May and a month later, González ratified it. The delay between when the facts were discovered and when they were reported was due to internal differences within YPF to deal with the issue, and the most controversial point may have been the decision to compensate one of those who would be involved. The price of silence? The mole was not so lucky.
One of the first to find out about this case was Cristina Kirchner, who was informed first-hand by González, and a few days ago Alberto Fernández was notified. Both agreed to promote the complaint. Now, it remains to be seen if Justice advances with the investigation or if the thread will be cut at the thinnest. How long has this practice existed? Perhaps it is the beginning of a more complex plot still unknown.
NOTICIAS tried to contact the president of YPF, Alejandro Garofani and Brian O’Durnin but got no response from any of them. The head of Security at the oil company, Diego Gorgal, was even contacted, who also did not want to talk to this magazine about this case.
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