Diego Carbone, the lawyer that began to represent the cooperative in place of Florencia Kravetz, declared:
“The testimony of Samuel Kaliman, was presented as General Director of Mercoteles, was shameful. He said that he did not know the address of the legal headquarters of the company, the stockholder composition, or when the directors met. Why do they want to bother us? Because this group of workers shined a light where they wanted shadows.”1
The scene of the dismal performance by Kaliman, brother-in-law of Marcelo Iurcovich, is recorded in Pierucci’s documentary, and for a good reason. In a small office of the court, the representative of Mercoteles was unable to correctly answer simple questions, like the working address of the business. Kaliman seemed not understand the line of questions about the relationship between Mercoteles SA and the BAUEN, looking at judicial officials like a schoolboy who had not done his homework, and repeating the question rather than responding to it. After affirming that “Mercoteles is the company that administers the hotel,” and Carbone objecting to that affirmation (“the hotel is administered by a cooperative”), he had to recognize that it did not “directly administer the hotel,” but that it “belonged to the company Mercoteles.” Also, he had a hard time saying where Mercoteles was working, until he finally had to acknowledge that it was in the BAUEN Suite, which is to say, the neighboring skyscraper, which still belongs to the Iurcovich group. Nor could he answer when the last board meeting had been held, or what topics had been dealt with. The cherry on top was when Diego Carbone, both exasperated and embarrassed by Kaliman’s attitude and evasiveness, asked him straight out if he knew the definition of the term “front man.” With a resigned face of someone who just wants his agony to end, Samuel Kaliman could give a response this time: “it’s a person that acts to cover up the presence of another.” That, clearly, was more real than the address of Mercoteles.
- Ib.↩