Héctor Yrimia: the last to fall

With a microphone in hand and in front of a gigantograph by Leonardo Cositorto, Héctor Yrimia referred to Generación Zoe as if he were one of its owners. In a talk that was recorded on YouTube, the former federal prosecutor and former investigating judge presented himself in front of an audience as the person who had collaborated so that the firm had a consistent legal structure. He said that, until his arrival, the company worked in an “illegal” way and that he himself had been in charge of correcting that problem. He spoke of the security of the trust where savers’ money was deposited and listed a confusing set of public institutions that, in theory, regulated their activity. He, of course, used the magic formula of personal example to build trust and claimed to have invested $110,000 himself. Could it be mistrusted?

Just a few months passed after that talk and all the promises fell apart. After the string of arrests ordered by the Cordoba prosecutor Juliana Compays in the framework of the investigation against Generación Zoe, which included Cositorto’s return to Argentina -who was a fugitive in the Dominican Republic-, Yrimia was the last to fall. On Tuesday the 12th, the lawyer turned himself in at the Interpol office in Dubai.
Yrimia, who appeared as legal director of the company, is accused of illicit association and fraud in the investigation carried out by the Villa María Second Investigation Prosecutor’s Office, one of the most advanced against Zoe. It is not the first time that she has Justice behind her. He left the public service in 2004, denounced for covering up a case of torture. At that time he decided to return to his studio, but his name once again had all eyes on him when prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused him of being part of the network created to cover up the AMIA attack – a case in which was later dismissed.

However, this time Yrimia’s situation is different. Despite the seriousness of the accusations that persecuted him in the past, he had managed to keep a very low profile and his face was unknown to the vast majority of the population. Now, on the contrary, the media explosion of the case against Generación Zoe put him at the center of the scene and perhaps he has to overcome many more obstacles: Cositorto has already begun to rehearse a defense in the interviews he gave and in all of them he pointed against the lawyer .

Internal. In the talk that Yrimia gave, he said that he came to Generación Zoe in March 2021 thanks to a partner in his studio. According to his account, his first reaction when he saw the company was surprise: “We came to a country where all the people were sad, bitter and wearing masks. I entered a room where all the people were happy, without a mask and laughing. I did not understand anything. It caught my attention and I said ‘I’m staying here because I like how people work’. Another day I went I saw that someone said ‘buy, sell’ so I invited Leo (Cositorto) and Maxi (Batista, Cositorto’s right-hand man) to the studio and I told them: ‘Look, I’m from a studio that we dedicate to protect our clients, to put together the appropriate legal scheme so that they are not disturbed, ”said the former judge.

So far, the story of Yrimia and Cositorto coincide. According to the founder of Generación Zeo “he was approached by a person known to Maxi. He presented himself with a large law firm, they met us at his firm on 9 de Julio and we hired them because they offered us a kind of monthly subscription that included the accounting part and a pool for the legal part, ”he said.

Norman Prospero is one of the accountants who came to Zoe from Yrimia. In an interview that he gave from prison he denied being part of the business structure and said that he did not touch savers’ money: “I do not deal with the money of my clients’ clients,” he maintained. That is probably the same strategy that the former judge tries to use: “A company hires you to set up a trust for them. You set it up, you collect your fees and then you are not responsible for the use they make of that structure,” said a lawyer who knows the case and Yrimia himself.

The former judge chose Martín Magram as his lawyer in Buenos Aires and the Gramática law firm will represent him in Córdoba. For the defenders, keeping the distance between Yrimia and Zoe will not be an easy task. According to the defendant himself, after that first meeting in the offices of 9 de Julio, it took him “four and a half months to analyze” the situation.

“I found that they were working illegally. When in the world of Law we say ‘alegal’ we mean that it is under no regulation. We didn’t have any problems because we were in a pandemic, the government people weren’t working and weren’t moving. But I thought that in the future, when we returned to normality, we could have a problem, ”said the former judge in that talk.

For this reason, according to his own story, he advised Generation Zoe to create a trust that, now, is one of the cards that Cositorto plays against him. “Yrimia got into a lot of business, she later brought us the trust with Julieta Sciutti and Maximiliano Mitroff, who are unpresentable and who ended up scamming us,” he declared in an interview. In another, he said that the lawyer Yrimia had recommended to him kept an apartment he owned and called him a “traitor.” For now, Yrimia remains silent. When he arrives in Argentina he will have to decide what his strategy will be.

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