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[David Martínez Guzmán] is a major holder of assets in Argentina, with Fintech Media LLC, a subsidiary of Fintech Advisory, owning “more than a billion dollars in financial assets” in Argentina alone. When he turned 30 in 1987, [David] Martínez started Fintech, reportedly with the help of a US$300,000 loan from his grandmother, which he was able to repay with interest within a year. Fintech’s investments have been described as extending “from New York to Patagonia.” Martínez has been heavily involved in the Argentinian economy for many years. Between 2004 and 2006... Martínez paid $100 million on the secondary market for Argentine bonds with a nominal value of $700 million.
Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, has noted that the rise in Martínez’s economic fortunes “coincided with the exceptional political cavalcade of the Kirchners after the collapse of the South American country in December 2001.” In 2006, Martínez met Kirchner himself at the Argentine Consulate in New York, along with Jorge Brito, president of the Argentinian bank Macro. Five days later, “Martínez purchased 40% shares of Cablevisión, the cable television system of Grupo Clarin, the largest media company in Argentina.” The next year, he invested in the Argentinian energy company Genneia. Martínez can be seen sitting in the front row of the audience in a video of the 2007 inauguration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Martínez bought Cablevisión “without any concern for antitrust legislation,” and did so at a time when Nestor Kirchner “decided to put his electoral campaign in the hands of Grupo Clarin” and allowed the purchase by Martínez of 50% of Cablevisión. In 2005, Kirchner signed a decree extending broadcast licenses by 10 years; on December 7, 2007, three days before leaving office, he signed a decree permitting the merger of Clarin and Martínez’s Cablevisión. The New York Times reported on October 11, 2012, on Martínez’s involvement in the bankruptcy of Vitro, a 103-year-old Mexican glassmaking firm run by the Sada family, an event that was surrounded by “Allegations…of covert meetings, fraudulent debts and crooked courts”. In response, American investor Paul Singer’s firm, Elliott Associates, and other hedge funds, which together owned about $700 million of Vitro’s old debt, claimed that Martínez had helped Vitro “muscle investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars through financial sleight of hand.”
