From bank employee to billionaire. From a house built by the State to an extensive list of luxury properties in different parts of the country. Sergio Urribarri It would be a successful example of social mobility if Justice had not ruled that he built his fortune on corruption.
After the heyday that took him to the governorship of Between riversand that made him dream of being a candidate for president, Urribarri spends his worst days: he was sentenced to eight years in prison for a mega-case of corruption and permanently disqualified from holding public office.
The assets of the former governor grew exponentially in the heat of power. This is how he acquired an immense amount of real estate that he still conserves. But his misfortune could be greater: it is that there are open files that would accumulate years of sentence and that, after his resignation as ambassador, he will have to face from the plain. The man from Entre Ríos is in the eye of the storm.
The fall. Urribarri never imagined himself condemned. He used to declare that he was “eager” to defend himself and that they were “attacks that will be demonstrated throughout the process”. It didn’t happen. The cataract of evidence that the prosecutors collected led him to a historic conviction: on Thursday the 7th, the Court of Trials and Appeals of Paraná read the grounds for the sentence that the Israeli ambassador followed virtually.
“Today’s first instance ruling is a clear example of arbitrariness, injustice and violation of the rule of law. I am going to appeal with the conviction that I am right, ”he wrote moments later on his Twitter account. And he completed: “However, I have made my resignation as ambassador available to the president.” Alberto Fernandez It didn’t take long for him to accept it.
The megacause brought together five files with irregularities committed during his governorship, between 2007 and 2015, in which the “cause of the cow”where a mechanism for paying returns through printers was investigated, and the “entrerriano dream”a diversion of public funds for his political career: he even set up a parador in Mar del Plata, in search of being a candidate for president in 2015.
Without pronouncing the word Lawfare, key in the vocabulary of Kirchnerism to defend itself before the Justice, Urribarri based his defense on that concept: he pointed to the prosecutors, to the journalist Daniel Enz for being “manifest anti-k who is obsessed with me” and even to Roger Frigerio, “that of the macrista Gestapo that is now being investigated.” It was not enough.
The collapse of the former governor of Entre Ríos could continue. It is that there are more files that are processed outside the main one and could accumulate more years in prison: Urribarri has open processes for illicit enrichment and negotiations incompatible with the public function. In addition, he is involved in other lawsuits, such as one for bogus legislative contracts.
Justice could advance on his family and also on his alleged figureheads. The principal, the Paraguayan businessman Diego Armando Cardona blacksmiths, benefited from the millionaire distribution of public works in Entre Ríos. For now, beyond the sentence against him, Urribarri’s fortune continues to be shielded.
capital. The former governor will be able to say, like few others, that Kirchnerism was his “decade won”. He accumulated luxury goods and used state resources as his own. Among other things, he built his place in the world in Salto Grande: a mansion that became the jewel in the crown and was visited by both politicians and celebrities.
The “weekend house” that he began to build in his second term as governor is a ranch house with 10 rooms, each with an en-suite bathroom, a large dining room and a large barbecue area. Outside, a large pool that borders the construction and serves as a viewpoint to the dam. Private beach, pier and a soccer field with professional measurements and automated irrigation, which was used on more than one occasion by professional players brought there by his son Bruno.
At the mansion on the Salto Grande peninsula, always well guarded according to the locals, it was more frequent for the then governor to arrive by air than by land.
Urribarri and his wife, Ana Lia Aguilera, they conserve the family house that they incorporated into the patrimony in their first years in politics, in Garat 200, Concordia. Although, of course, with the passing of time square meters of luxury and comfort were added. In that town, the family has other important properties, such as the one on 25 de Mayo and Avellaneda, where the ex-wife of one of his five children resides.
They also have properties in the Capital, such as the one at Lafinur 3300, a few meters from Avenida Libertador, which is used by the entire family clan. That, of course, without counting other assets in the name of companies and figureheads that Justice continues to investigate.
Genesis. In his childhood, in a field in Entre Ríos, Urribarri could not imagine that when he grew up he would accumulate such a fortune. He was a bank teller until politics crossed his life. From there he would come to dream of the presidency of the country, before everything began to collapse.
The son of a rural school director and a railway employee, he studied for a public accountant although he did not graduate.
He was mayor of the small town of General Campos, provincial legislator and government minister, before Jorge Busti, whom he presented as his “brother and friend”, supported him to succeed him as governor. Those who closely followed that campaign, in 2007, say that it did not take a day for him to turn his back on him: culminating the election that declared him the winner, he betrayed his political godfather.
It was campaign manager of Adolfo Rodríguez Saá in 2003, but also the first to jump ship to become a Kirchnerist, when that movement was being born. Also He had been a Menemist and functional to whoever was usefull. She just wanted power. And do business.
He got into the world of construction, soccer and agriculture (an issue that he carefully hid during Kirchnerism, when the countryside was the enemy), among many other areas.
In 2015, despite his intentions to run for President, he had to give in to Daniel Scioli. In exchange, the former Buenos Aires governor had promised him that he would be his Minister of the Interior and Transportation. Sources from Entre Ríos reveal that Urribarri was so convinced of victory that he had promised his people that they would move to the Federal Capital: some of them even rented a property that he never used.
His return to the front lines occurred with the irruption of the front of all. Alberto Fernández appointed him as ambassador to Israel in May 2020, although the pandemic delayed his arrival at his destination. It didn’t take him long to star in the first scandal: months after his arrival, a video went viral in which he was seen dancing at a party. “Tomorrow, everyone with covid”, he comments with amusement in the images that generated repudiation.
Those who investigate Urribarri believe that they have just begun to pull the thread. They assure that there is much to know about a heritage that has no limits. And that the sentence he suffered is only the first: the man who one day dreamed of making the “entrerriano dream” a reality, today lives a nightmare.
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