ARGENTINA: Gambling Away the Money of the Mentally Ill

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 13 2005 (IPS) - The case of an Argentine court-appointed guardian who stole and squandered the money of mental patients under his care could be just one example of a much broader racket.

For a year and a half, legal guardian Juan Carlos Fortuny had been pilfering money placed under his custody and gambling it away.

He then planned a failed "self-kidnapping" with the intent of using the ransom collected from his relatives to cover part of the missing funds. When the scheme was exposed, he first claimed he had been the victim of extortion, then finally admitted that he had lost roughly 208,000 dollars in the casinos.

Fortuny had signing authority over a bank account administered by the Buenos Aires provincial department responsible for the legal guardianship of the mentally ill, having been granted power of attorney over the assets of individuals deemed unfit to manage their own affairs.

"I never used a penny of that money for myself. I didn’t even buy myself a pair of socks. I gambled with it to recoup what had been stolen from me, and then I couldn’t stop," Fortuny alleged. He was arrested this week, while an investigation into the full extent of the fraud is underway.

The case focused the national spotlight on the government’s lax control over the management of the assets of people judged incapable of fending for themselves.

But while Fortuny’s case is particularly sensational, it is certainly not the only one. Embezzlement is a common practice within the legal guardianship system, but it rarely comes to public attention, since the victims have no voice.

"We want a thorough investigation of the ‘mafias’ operating inside the guardianship system, and we are going to fully cooperate with the courts for this purpose," said Víctor Dellarrosa, secretary of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and leader of the Union of Justice System Employees, in an interview with IPS.

Dellarrosa added that these crimes are not isolated incidents, but rather form part of an operation covered up by the authorities.

Legal guardians or trustees can be appointed by the courts to manage the affairs of minors or individuals deemed mentally unfit who do not have relatives to carry out this role.

These guardians are employed by the public defender’s department of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office.

On May 19, federal public defender Miguel Angel Romero will appear before a congressional judicial committee for questioning in relation to 30 charges against him. Based upon the committee’s ruling, Romero could subsequently stand trial on a range of charges, including improper performance of duties, irregular hiring practices, abuse of power and incompetence.

Although the allegations against Romero are varied and date back over many years, the irregularities uncovered in the guardianship system have now been included in the ongoing investigations.

One of the charges against him is having "compromised the right of the incapacitated to representation and proper management of their assets," based on evidence covered during a brief audit of the legal guardianship system.

A complaint lodged by a relative of an incapacitated individual led Romero himself to order the audit of the federal department of legal guardianship last December. But two months after Marcelo Jalil was designated to lead up this inspection, Romero withdrew his support and Jalil stepped down.

Nevertheless, during the brief period in which he was able to investigate, Jalil uncovered a vast array of irregularities.

For example, real estate properties owned by individuals confined to psychiatric hospitals or long-term care homes for the elderly were rented out to department employees or their relatives at absurdly low rates and without the proper authorisation.

The inspection also uncovered unjustified withdrawals from patients’ bank accounts and unauthorised purchases of appliances and even private cemetery plots, with no evidence as to where these assets had ended up.

The auditing team also found a note from an accountant, expressing her concern to a court-appointed guardian over a 22,000-dollar withdrawal from the bank account of a mental hospital patient under the guardian’s care, given that there was no indication of what had become of the money.

The team came across a number of similar complaints that had simply been filed away.

The Union of Justice System Employees offered to cooperate in the inspection, and alerted the authorities to the possible existence of illicit association among officials in this branch of the Public Prosecutor’s Office involving fraudulent exploitation of the assets of individuals supposedly protected by the state.

For the moment, however, only Fortuny has been taken into custody, and his defence attorneys believe he will not be held for long. They are claiming that their client "did not embezzle public funds, but rather private assets." If this argument is accepted, the charges against Fortuny will be considerably reduced.

They also claim that their client suffers from a gambling addiction, and if they are successful in demonstrating this, he could be acquitted altogether.

As a counterattack, the defence is additionally charging the state with failing to exercise the proper controls and thus allowing Fortuny to dispose of the assets he was responsible for at his whim, with no supervision.

They further allege that the state is to blame for allowing the operation of casinos, which provide gambling addicts with the opportunity to squander both their own and other people’s money.