Politics The suitcase scandal has become a serial novel in which every minute of the recordings has a different approach.

The defendants have talked about the way to close the case in Argentina, about documents or about the money that Venezuelan-American businessman Guido Antonini Wilson would have charged to remain silent. But they have also made reference to more prosaic and trivial topics, from where to buy large clothes (the overweight Moisés Maionica and Alejandro Antonini is proverbial), to the girlfriend of Venezuelan businessman Franklin Durán, the three million dollars that Antonini earned in 2006, his Italian origin, or Maionica's confession: "I am a corporate lawyer and this is the first time in my life that I do anything like that."

On November 30, 2007, Antonini (AA) and Maionica (MM) held a conversation in which he recounted how he met Franklin Durán, his future partner and friend. That was almost two decades ago, when Durán was the boyfriend of the daughter of one Antonini's partner, far from the times of the private aircraft and Ferrari luxury cars that Durán enjoyed before his arrest last December.

AA - "I met Franklin in 1990 or 1991. He was the boyfriend of the daughter of my partner, who has a big transportation company in the central part of the country. Then, Durán was dating the daughter of my associate, who did not like Franklin because he was poor. "That is life!" Somebody introduced him to me and I was selling off a business that belonged to my father. I invited him to stay at my house in the Colonia Tovar," Antonini said. "He came and went because it was Easter time and he had no money. He was a poor boy. I never saw him again."

Later, Maionica explains his conversation with the oil executive Ángel Morales (who replaced Diego Uzcátegui as the head of the state-run oil subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, Pdvsa Sur). Apparently, Morales mentioned a "retaliation" of the group headed by Julio De Vido (the Argentinean Minister for Federal Planning) to the group headed by Claudio Uberti (to whom the Argentinean opposition parties call "the cashier of the Kirchners.")

"I had a two-hour meeting with Morales and he told me: "Moisés, I think that in the problem faced by Alejandro, there was a retaliation planned by the De Vido's group against Uberti aimed at removing Uberti and, on the other hand, to ask Diego to quit. "It was retaliation."

Translated by: Gerardo Cárdenas

Noelia Sartre
EL UNIVERSAL