Overpricing claims, removal of officials poses questions for Milei ally Reidel

The crisis at the Nucleoeléctrica Argentina (NA-SA) state nuclear power agency has entered into a new phase. After internal complaints were presented to the state firm’s Integrity Council for presumed irregularities in contracting cleaning services, the board of the nuclear agency decided to remove two officials previously appointed by the company’s president Demian Reidel. 

Yet far from being contained, the situation continues to escalate. Perfil revealed the initial allegations earlier this month and now has access to a presentation to federal courts lodged before the conflict became public knowledge. The lawsuit adds a worrying antecedent – it includes a warning about tenders possibly being steered towards favoured firms.

The case triggering the scandal was the tender for cleaning services for nuclear plants. As revealed by Perfil earlier this month, an internal complaint warned that a company called LX Argentina could win the race with an offer over 140 percent more than the historic cost of the service and the reference prices used by the company itself. The presentation, signed by the manager of the Atucha I-II nuclear plant, Juan Pablo Nolasco Sáenz, described internal pressures, attempts to rewrite technical reports and a process which, if successful, would have implied significant economic damage for NASA.

In that context, the board of directors resolved to halt the contract, firing Nucleoeléctrica Argentina’s general manager Marcelo Famá and the manager of Administrative Coordination, Hernán Pantuso – two men trusted by Reidel. Famá was replaced by Fernando Monserrat, who previously held the post and is widely recognised by company employees for his week; Pantuso’s responsibilities have passed on a temporary basis to Ricardo Matuk, who runs the area of Administration and Finances.

The exit of both officials coincides with the appearance of new allegations adding more tension to the internal atmosphere. Nolasco Sáenz’s presentation to the Integrity Committee was joined by another involving a firm named M&G Facility Service, who questioned the requisites of admissibility included in the different tenders, denouncing exclusions on a discretionary basis. 

According to internal company sources, there are also a dozen anonymous presentations, which are permitted under the committee’s rules, reinforcing the feeling that the conflict far exceeds a single file.

 

Antecedents

The most delicate antecedent precedes the media flurry. Before Perfil published the first article on the cleaning services tender, another firm, Distribón SRL, had turned to a federal court to impugn another tender for presumed steering of the competition between bidders in one direction. 

At stake is not just general cleaning work – the zone requires, for example, special suits against radiation, a service in which the firm has a track record.

The presentation of Distribón was signed by its owner, Alejandro Davison, requesting an injunction to suspend the tender. Oscar Papavero, at the helm of the San Martín Federal Courtroom N° 1 for Civil and Commercial Law, did not halt the process but left open the underlying question of its legality, afterwards remitting it to the federal courtroom with territorial jurisdiction in the Campana area. 

The plaintiff is now awaiting the end of the judicial holiday.

In general terms, the Distribón presentation maintains that NA-SA incorporated arbitrary requisites into the tender, like requiring mínimum staffing levels, the seniority of companies and technical certifications bearing no direct relationship with the aim of the contract. According to the plaintiff, the new NASA requisites came combined with impossible timetables.

“Despite being a service with complex technical specifications, since it involved radioactive residue, the tender was called with an extremely demanding period of 15 days for the presentation of offers, thus causing even more suspicions of the clauses steering it in one direction, bearing in mind the enormous volume of documentation, evaluation and the request for exorbitant antecedents,” the presentation maintains.

Nobody in the company wants to answer questions nor Reidel himself, who did not respond to the messages sent by Perfil. 

It would be difficult for the directors to allege ignorance of the discontent among some firms with years providing services for the company. Distribón, for example, sent letters to the board of directors to warn them of the situation by using concrete examples of the requirements, saying in one of its writs: “A permanent staff of 500 workers is required when Distribón SRL has been performing this service satisfactorily for four years with a significantly smaller crew without being questioned at all.” 

Those letters were sent to the board of directors on October 28 and 31, long before the scandal with LX Argentina exploded. 

Then, it passed almost unnoticed at the time but takes on another dimension today. 

For some sectors with NA-SA, the presentations of Distribón anticipated a pattern which later reappeared in the charges of Nolasco Sáenz and those accumulating in recent weeks – the suspicion that the changes introduced into the tenders were not neutral but favoured a reduced group of bidders.
 

Split down the middle

The LX Argentina scandal ended up splitting the board of directors down the middle, according to sources. As in the Distribón presentation, Nolasco Sáenz underlined that some of the irregularities originated from amending the requisites of admissibility demanded of the companies.

In the case of the process questioned by Nolasco Sáenz, the official maintained in his internal denunciation that, due to those changes, of the nine companies presenting themselves for the cleaning services contract for Lote 5 (the point in question), only two managed to be admitted: La Mantovana Servicios Generales and LX Argentina. 

A few days later, and despite not having been evaluated by Technical Analysis, the firm Limpiolux was incorporated as a third possible supplier.

All three offered strikingly high sums above what is currently collected for the service. Among those options, LX Argentina was the most economical and it was thus taken for granted that it had been favoured.

When this information became known (as reconstructed by Perfil on the basis of conversations with sources aware of the internal discussions), NA-SA vice-president Guido Lavalle requested that the board of directors meet to analyse the questioned tender and also debate the continuity of Pantuso and Famá. 

His proposal was accompanied by Axel Larreteguy and Diego Chaher, the latter director entrusted with the task of advancing with the privatisation of 54 percent of NA-SA, which explains, different sources agree, his interest in preventing this internal conflict from escalating and complicating that process. 

The group pushed the replacement of Famá by Monserrat with a concrete aim: to contain the internal discontent and guarantee operational continuity. 

“Nobody wants people to rebel in this context,” summed up one source with access to the company helm. 

In a few weeks Atucha must face a scheduled halt for maintenance tasks, a critical period which requires unblocking purchases and short-term contracts. For the board of directors, the priority is to keep the company functioning as normally as possible.

The vote nevertheless left open wounds. Within the company they tell that, before the meeting, Lavalle argued fiercely with Reidel. The NA-SA president and the director Marco Campolonghi had reportedly tried to defend the continuity of the questioned officials. 

After finding themselves in a minority, they both walked out of the meeting in an atmosphere of maximum tension. 

Perfil communicated with the company’s Institutional Relations department and with Reidel himself to learn their stance but obtained no response.

 

Counter-attack 

Far from closing the conflict, displacing Pantuso led to a counterattack. Just one day before being fired, the soon-to-be ex-manager of Administrative Coordination presented an extensive writ to the Integrity Committee and the board of directors rejecting the accusations against him and aiming directly against Nolasco Sáenz. 

In that presentation, Pantuso maintained that the denunciation over the cleaning services tender was a reaction to his toughening internal controls, accusing the plant manager of having convalidated in 2023 deviations superior to 300 percent in similar contracts without meeting technical or economic objections.

That crosscharge, which has now become public, adds a new layer to a crisis no longer limited to a tender or a handful of officials. At stake is the control over purchasing processes in a strategic company facing a plan of privatisation and infighting which, far from fading, keeps adding chapters.

Pantuso is a journalist who worked with Daniel Scioli when Buenos Aires Province governor while, since 2017, he has been the partner of the current Tourism Secretary’s brother, Nicolás Scioli, in the Imoove SRL consultants.

This is not a minor detail for his adversaries eyeing the company Limpiolux (incorporated into the tender now under debate). The firm belongs to the Peluso family, which has doubled its contracts under the Milei government, according to theLa Nación newspaper last May. 

The ex-president of the company, Cecilia Peluso, awaits trial for presumed overpricing in a contract celebrated with AFIP tax bureau when under Ricardo Echegaray. Her brother Luis Alberto headed the Instituto de Lotería y Casinos of Buenos Aires Province, when Scioli was governor.

In Pantuso’s entourage they deny that this link explains the entry of Limpiolux into the controversial tender and that he entered NA-SA via the say of the former speedboat racer.

Defenders say that Pantuso and Famá were not fired but only had their rights to sign suspended. Nevertheless, they know that an internal investigation will immediately begin to evaluate whether summary proceedings correspond. They are evaluating whether to present their resignations while in public they have been demanding Reidel’s head until now.

Despite being a great friend of Javier Milei, Reidel, a talented physicist,  knows that he has gained more than one enemy within La Libertad Avanza. That is why there is no confidence that there will be any vehement defence of his management. 

For now silence prevails while the internal accusations advance.