MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Corruption controversy: Argentine official calls US diplomats “a joke”

Cabinet Chief Anibal Fernandez, the most aggressive member of Mrs. Kirchner’s cabinet

Argentina’s Cabinet Chief Aníbal Fernández is the latest high-ranking official to address the Wikileaks controversy after Spanish newspaper El País published several cables that denounced various corruption cases within the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration.

“Some US diplomats are a joke. They gather cheap gossip from opposition websites in order to justify their pay-checks,” he said, referring to the staff of the US embassy in Argentina.

“I think the US Department of State, the one with the real problem, has finally come to realize that it has had diplomats around the world who were nothing but a lazy joke, sending articles from anti-government, yellow press websites as if they were the result of some great investigation,” he stated.

Anibal Fernández believes those diplomats “steal cheap information from ill-spirited websites and send them to their government in order to justify their pay-checks, which I’m sure they are pretty fat.”

“There is nothing that proves any action leading to a corruption case” the minister concluded.

Fernández joins Federal Planning Minister Julio De Vido in criticism towards the US embassy officials. On Wednesday Vido recommended the embassy to “hire more competent officials”.