The chicken or the egg
The Iurcovich group was now under the control of Hugo, the son of the founder, Marcelo, but it still had the same old tricks. For them, the hotel had always been their property. In that sense, they had the advantage of really knowing what arguments they had to demand its return. While the prevailing version was that the Iurcoviches were only creditors to Solari, and as owners of the Bauen brand, the issue seemed tricky to resolve, because the business that had gone bankrupt was not the Iurcoviches’, but Solari’s, which, in turn, was not the owner of the building, because it had not been able to pay for it. So, the cooperative had a problem, which was a lack of clarity on whom to confront, with whom to dispute the possibility of using the hotel legally. In this context, the group begin to wield the argument that property belonged to a company whose conformation was quite similar to those of the rest of the Iurcovich group, with a directorate which featured Hugo himself and was represented by old figures from the business.
However, the one who had gone bankrupt was Solari, and so the members of the cooperative were occupying a hotel that was not owned by their former employers.
For workers coming from the original Bauen, who had been under a boss—namely, Iurcovich—there was no doubt that the group continued to be behind the difficulties that soon started to appear. For everyone else, the panorama was legally confusing. A article with no signature or sources on the news website Urgente24 mentioned an “investigation” by an obscure magazine, Edition i,1 which tried to frame every plot and dispute between workers and the Iurcovich group as a simple and rather crude political operation driven by Diego Kravetz (who did it all in the name of “ibarrismo,” as a partisan of Aníbal Ibarra, already the former Chief of Government of Buenos Aires) to damage the new leader of the city, Jorge Telerman. In the crazy web the magazine spins, it is affirmed that Mercoteles bought the hotel from the Iurcovich group once the bankruptcy judge returned the property to it, taking it from Solari SA. Concerning Mercoteles, the article says verbatim that “there is not much data on this enterprise, which declares that it has the funds to recondition the building and make it function correctly.”
- “The children of Ibarra: From Kravetz to the Bauen,” in Urgente24, 8 June 2006. http://www.urgente24.com/132713-la-cria-de-ibarra-de-kravetz-al-bauen↩