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Last Sunday, Patricio Carey was arrested by the PSA as soon as he touched Argentine soil at the Ezeiza airport, after a brief stopover in Rome. He came triumphant from watching the World Cup in Qatar. Thus, he paraded guarded by two uniformed men with a pistol at his belt to the patrol car that would take him back to Rosario, his city.
A 32-year-old businessman, financier, with an address set in an opulent house in the northern part of the city, Carey was accused of sell $17,776 to Marcelo “Coto” Medrano, a drug trafficker murdered at the end of 2020. Now, he was imprisoned for having tried to hinder that criminal investigation against him and faces a request for five years in prison, according to prosecutors Sebastián Narvaja and Miguel Moreno, from the Economic and Complex Crimes unit.
Although he was not prohibited from leaving the country, during his stay abroad the prosecutors collected data in the case that motivated the arrest request. There was a change in the record wind. According to Moreno and Narvaja in the imputed hearing that took place in the Criminal Justice Center, an employee of the financial company Cofyrco -which Carey was supposedly leading- provided new information.
The employee, had not contributed any element when declaring testimonially last May, now he presented himself again and gave precise data on the functioning, roles and operations that were carried out in that “cave” located in Corrientes at 700, in the microcenter of Rosario.
The witness’s change in attitude was due, according to his own testimony, which was filmed and reproduced at the hearing, to the fact that before testifying for the first time had felt “fear” after a meeting with Carey, since he would have intimidated him about not telling what was done in Cofyrco. The financial company was marked with a red alert from the Central Bank in July of this year, warning that exchange operations should not be taken, according to the Official Gazette. The firm was raided. Before those operations, Carey was mentioned as vice president of Cofyrco on the firm’s website.
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“Now the witness declared what he knew and it was demonstrated that the statements were different. Judge María Carrara considered that this could imply a possible obstruction of evidence and ordered preventive detention,” prosecutor Narvaja told Infobae.
The witness’s statement was also contextualized by the officials of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, who explained that from the outset there was “procedural risk” because Cofyrco authorities had established an “emergency protocol in case of trespassing.” “The firm’s employees declared that they were instructed that in that case they had to leave through a back door of the property and take computers, promissory notes, mutuals, checks, money and documentation,” said Narvaja, who recalled that at the time of the procedure made in the financial “Patricio Carey’s brother came out the back door and took two tablets so we can’t access all the information.”
Another of the data that the prosecutors gave is that in Cofyrco supposedly also Parallel dollars were sold to Gustavo Shanahan, former owner of the port of Rosario who is currently being prosecuted as an alleged drug trafficker, accused by the assistant prosecutor of the PROCUNAR Matías Scilabra of being the supplier of foreign currency to the gang of Julio Andrés Rodríguez Granthon, one of the most feared drug traffickers in the jurisdiction. The gang then used those bills to buy the drugs they sold in Villa Banana, in the western part of Rosario.
In the case for having sold dollars to “Coto” Medrano Other Cofyrco officials have already been sentenced, such as Fernando Verseci and Teodoro Fracasi, who received three years of conditional execution plus a fine of more than $35,000. Another of the partners, Guido Garay, received a probation.
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