Sebastián Piñera and Cristina Fernández meet in Rome, 2008 (Photo: Wikipedia)
On Sunday, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took to Twitter to discuss, among other things, the conflict with LAN, specifically targeting the fact that shortly after assuming the presidency, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera sold his shares in the company.
In a long series of tweets, the president said: “Can you imagine if Aerolíneas Argentinas, instead of being a recovered flagship airline… had been a business that I owned and when I was elected President I had ‘sold’?”
“Mother of God! Beside the firing squad I would have been put before in the media I never would have become a candidate. Or maybe yes. After all, I would be one of them. What a thing, no?”
On Monday, Chile’s foreign affairs minister, Alfredo Moreno, responded to the President’s latest tweets, saying “Sebastián Piñera sold LAN to avoid a conflict of interest.”
The spokesperson for Piñera, Cecilia Pérez Jara, responded as well yesterday, saying “In Chile, at least when an authority is elected, he discloses his assets, discloses his interests, they are all public.”
Pérez Jara also criticised President Fernández’s style of communication: “How did she communicate? By Twitter. Who answered her? The minister… the President of Chile communicates with Chileans through the media, and through direct contact.”
In her Sunday tweets, President Fernández also referred to the foreign ownership of airlines in Argentina: “Here, because of a hangar in Aeroparque, they mount a media attack against the state-owned ARGENTINE company that carries out 80% of the domestic flights in the country.”
“In plain language: the one that is in charge of the transporting Argentines, regardless of whether the destinations are profitable or not.”
Last week, President Fernández had made statements about the imbalance of businesses between the countries, and that LAN had privileges to operate in Argentina that were not reciprocated towards Argentine companies in Chile. Officials in Chile responded, claiming that Chile offered Argentina all the same opportunities.
The post LAN Conflict: Chile Responds to President Fernández’s Tweets appeared first on The Argentina Independent.
