Jorge Antonio

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Jorge Antonio (1965)

Jorge Antonio (actually Jorge Antonio Chibene ) (born October 14, 1917 in La Boca / Buenos Aires , † February 11, 2007 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine businessman who was politically close to President Juan Domingo Perón .

Life

Jorge Antonio was born the son of Syrian - Lebanese immigrants in Buenos Aires and lived in Uruguay until he was 17 .

Business career

After serving at the military school, he worked for branches of important foreign companies such as General Motors , Mercedes-Benz , Hanomag , Deutz and Fahr . In 1943 he met Perón, whom he had supported politically since 1949. Through his political contacts, his fortune grew rapidly. He started selling cars in 1948, soon after buying radio stations and a news agency, then investing in agriculture and banking. By 1965, his net worth had grown to $ 215 million. Jorge Antonio employed a number of former Nazi leaders in his company. a. Adolf Eichmann under the false name Ricardo Clement. He later admitted that he knew his true identity and that he needed the German specialists whose relocation he had helped to build up the Argentine economy. In the “Aguirre, Mastro y Compañía” dealership that he ran and which had already worked for Mercedes-Benz before the war, around 30 German refugees had been employed since 1950, some of whom had entered the country with false papers issued by the Vatican . Altogether there were probably a few thousand employees of German origin in the companies founded by Juan Antonio.

After Perón's fall in 1955, forces that were friendly to England tried to eliminate Jorge Antonio's annoying competition by force if necessary. He tried to leave the country but was arrested and held first in Ushuaia and then in Río Gallegos for two years . His property was sold to the military. However, he managed to escape and get political asylum in Chile . He later lived in Cuba until the 1958 revolution , then in Spain, where he organized the financing of Perón and the Peronists in exile until the 1970s. Despite Perón's election victory in 1973, he visited Argentina briefly only twice before finally returning in 1977. Jorge Antonio was also friends with the Peronist President Carlos Saúl Menem - also the son of Syrian immigrants - and received a severance payment of around 30 to 70 million US dollars from him, but later distanced himself from him.

Jorge Antonio died in 2007. With his two wives he had nine children, according to other sources eight.

Involvement in Nazi deals and money laundering

According to research by Gaby Weber and according to his own statements, Jorge Antonio was involved in money laundering by the Nazis after 1945 . In March 1944, Ludwig Erhard, as head of the Institute for Industrial Research financed by the Reichsgruppe Industrie , presented a “program for dealing with post-war economic problems from the standpoint of industry”, which stated: “The soldiers returning from the fronts must be housed, an unemployed army prevented become. Huge amounts of capital will be necessary to import groceries. ”In August 1944, important German industrialists, under the direction of the director of Hermsdorf-Schomburg-Isolatoren-GmbH Johann Friedrich Scheid , planned how they would hide their wealth through Swiss channels in the Maison Rouge hotel in Strasbourg could. This meeting was observed by the Deuxième Bureau ; the observations reached the US secret service in 1945. According to Gaby Weber's research, Juan Antonio was invited to Stuttgart by Daimler boss Wilhelm Haspel in April 1950 to set up a new branch in Argentina with the help of funds that had been hidden before 1945. In 1951 he helped found Daimler-Benz Argentina together with the Argentine Central Bank. The money and also used machines that might have been hidden in Sweden, contributed the German side - partly disguised as loans from Switzerland - on secret channels, since German foreign investments were officially still prohibited. A network of front men, accountants, authorized signatories and lawyers served for this purpose. According to Weber, the legal basis for money laundering was the German-Argentine trade agreement negotiated with Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard in July 1950. In addition to Wilhelm Haspel u. a. Fritz Könecke and Hanns-Martin Schleyer . In total, it was probably about investments of 100 million US dollars. In the years that followed, Jorge Antonio received large sums of money from other German industrial companies, such as Thyssen, Mannesmann, Klöckner, Korff, Siemens, Schering and Bayer. He was also involved in the re-establishment of the Argentine Fahr SA in 1953 with Hans Kleiner as managing director. After Jorge Antonio's career ended, Daimler reached an out-of-court settlement to get his property back in Argentina.

literature

  • Gaby Weber: Daimler-Benz and the Argentina Connection. About rat lines and Nazi money. Berlin, Hamburg 2004.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johann Friedrich Scheid's curriculum vitae on hermsdorf-regional.de
  2. ^ US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128. In: cuttingthroughthematrix.com. Retrieved October 27, 2016 .
  3. ^ Daniel Jeffreys: Fourth Reich plot revealed. In: The Independent , September 7, 1996, accessed October 24, 2016.
  4. ^ Heinz Schneppen: Odessa, tajna organizacja esesmanów . Bellona, ​​January 1, 2009 ( google.de [accessed October 27, 2016]).
  5. ↑ Gaby Weber: If you call that money laundering. In: die taz , July 3, 2004, accessed on October 24, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Antonio, Jorge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Antonio Chibene, Jorge (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH La Boca
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 2007
Place of death Buenos Aires