On May 20, 1998, five days after the Justice ordered his arrest for the crime of Joseph Louis Heads, Alfredo Yabrán committed suicide. But his death was not the end of the story, much less that of his emporium. The fortune of the man who during the 1990s boasted of having built “a State within the State” survived in the hands of his widow, María Cristina Pérez, and her children, Mariano, Pablo and Melina.
Installed in the most luxurious neighborhoods of Uruguay, the heirs became a practically impenetrable clan. From the shadows and with a very low profile, continue to run old businesses and new investments are encouraged. Despite rubbing elbows with influential personalities from the business world, they hide behind the mystery.
The Yabráns divide their lives today between Montevideo, Punta del Este, Buenos Aires and Miami, cities where they not only have some of their properties but also important businesses in the field of logistics, shipments and real estate developments. Mariano is the executive director of Sendit and who decided to take charge of business life. Pablo, his older brother, divides his working life with his activity as a DJ at electronic parties. María Cristina and Melina let men take care of the money and are dedicated to the family.
Twenty years after the assassination of Cabezas, NOTICIAS published a cover in which it reconstructed the lives of the magnate’s heirs. As soon as the magazine hit the streets, the first reaction of the protagonists of the note was close your social media accounts. It was not by chance: Melina used Twitter to write encrypted messages about her father, whom she called “Dad”, and Mariano had compared Yabrán’s unconditional love for his family to that of Walter White, the drug trafficker from the series “Breaking Bad”.
Five years later, keeping track of them is no easy task. Melina’s YouTube channel is the only digital footprint left by the family on the web, where the tycoon’s youngest daughter posted a video of the trip she took with the whole clan to Disney. His friends, when consulted, prefer not to answer questions and although a good part of the business and political universe knows them, nobody wants to talk about them.
With the businessman’s suicide, the clan decided to break with a good part of Yabrán’s trusted men such as Wenceslao Bunge and Pablo Argibay Molina, his spokesman and lawyer, respectively. According to Gabriel Michi in his book “Heads. A journalist. A crime. A country” (Editorial Planeta), the accountants Francisco Gazquez-Molina Y Oscar Roberto Javurek and the lawyer Paul Medrano they are among the few who survived in the family environment and whose names appear in and out of the directories of their companies.
However, there was only one man who not only managed to stay by the side of the clan but also became someone of absolute trust for the heirs: the lawyer Hector Colella. In social networks, the children of Colella and the Yabrán maintain a permanent interaction and send affectionate messages that demonstrate a relationship beyond the strictly business.
In one of the letters he wrote before taking his own life, Yabrán arranged for his business to be in charge of “HC”, as he used to call his friend and trusted man. “The Colella family and the Yabrán family have a close lifelong bond”, they say from the environment of the lawyer, whose name appeared in the international investigation known as the Pandora Papers and revived the suspicions that pointed to him, at the end of the 90s, as the figurehead of Yabrán, an accusation that was formally presented in Justice by the then deputy Franco Caviglia and promoted by Eduardo Duhalde and Domingo Cavallo.
