Exclusive: Former HSBC President Gabriel Martino works with Larreta to get Pfizer vaccines
Gabriel Martino has been working with the Government of Buenos Aires with the aim of obtaining Pfizer vaccines for the City. The former official of the local HSBC subsidiary is one of those responsible for carrying out the "vaccine diplomacy" for gaining the national authorization for districts to acquire dosages.
"I'm not going to talk about that subject," replied Martino when questioned by LPO. However, he did not deny that he was working with his contacts to get Pfizer vaccines. Martino is an executive with an international reputation and if he manages to negotiate doses for the district, he will put Alberto Fernández in a complicated situation.
The banker is a personal friend of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and his brother Augusto. He is also very close to Mauricio Macri and that closeness cost him the presidency of the Argentine subsidiary of HSBC after the PRO defeat in the 2019.
With the return of Kirchnerism to power, he elegantly departed to stay six months in London at the headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and left his post to found his own consultancy, BFLInvest. He never lost his closeness to macrism.
The city government had revealed to this website that after Santiago Cafiero's "authorization", they would do their best to obtain doses, although they later clarified that these would be distributed among all the Argentine provinces. An excellent launch pad for Larreta's presidential project.
During Macri's government, Martino was practically a minister without a portfolio, acting as a presidential adviser, and had direct access to both Quinta de Olivos and Los Abrojos.
As LPO published, in the last year of her term, Cristina Kirchner ordered the Central Bank to kick Martino out of HSBC for not taking steps to prevent money laundering maneuvers, following the release of 4,000 undeclared accounts of Argentineans in the bank's Swiss branch.
Kirchner's decision involved fines of several million pesos and court complaints against Martino, who even left the country for a few months. All the court battles were immediately halted after Macri arrived at Casa Rosada.
Currently, Macri's preferred banker not only took over HSBC Argentina again, but also participated in most debt issuances, and was placed as the vice president of the Financial Information Unit (UIF), the public entity responsible for combating money laundering, a crime for which he was accused. Martino was the only person to want to finance the controversial PPP projects and was behind Pichetto's election as vice president.