Sandra Palleiro is looking for her lost cows. The 60 -year -old accountant is in a muddy field at the end of a farm trail in the Uruguay border region with Brazil.
She traveled 600 kilometers from Montevideo to find 61 head of cattle that belong to her, at least on paper. Missing cattle were part of a “cattle titles” scheme that collapsed, causing one of Uruguay’s largest financial scandals.
The co -owner of a Uruguayan company that received money from savers to invest in cows died from suicide. Three companies went bankrupt and are being investigated for fraud.
“Hello, moo-moo! Can one of you be mine?” Palmer shouted hopeful in a surrounded in the border region of Artigas, with his mud -covered jeans as he approaches a wire fence to see the cows more closely.
Pallet – like hundreds of other investors – cannot find the animals that belong to him or prove that they exist, which makes them part of a flock of “ghost cows” that can reach more than 700,000 heads of cattle.
US $ 350 million in losses
To date, the losses have reached about $ 350 million, shaking the stable agricultural nation, which has only 3.4 million, but 12 million heads of cattle. The fact also caused a commotion in the larger placers, Argentina and Brazil, who took Uruguay’s cattle tracking system as a model and where similar cattle investment schemes operate.
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In March 2024, Palmer put his savings of more than $ 50,000 in the cattle investment scheme offered by a local company called Conexión Ganadera, attracted by promises of 7 to 10% dollars fixed returns with bucolic photos of brown and white hereford cattle.
Savings could be direct owners of cows that would be created and sold with profit by livestock companies or assume an investment participation in the general scheme. Pallet, an urban professional, liked the idea of having a tangible asset. It looked like a safe bet.
It could track cows through a state -backed online portal – which for years was a global example of cattle tracking – which defined breed, age and location. Each cow should be marked with a symbol attributed by the government and the documents listed their assets brought the Ministry of Agriculture’s coat of arms, which supervises cattle registration.
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The National Cattle Registry of Uruguay refused to comment on the cases.
When he was looking for his cows, Palmer took printed copies of the cattle record to see if he could combine the 53 tracking numbers linked to this ranch with the cows labels that stared at her on the other side of the fence.
Using your smartphone’s camera, it has expanded the tracking numbers fixed on the ears. Soon it was clear that few numbers coincided. Then the cows began to move away. She couldn’t get close enough. The exercise seemed hopeless.
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“It’s like falling into a nightmare,” said Palmer.
Schemes like this are not rare in the region
Similar investment schemes exist throughout South America, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. Many are legitimate.
Martín Fablet, a local radio host in Montevideo, said he has invested several times in the Ganadera Conexión and other livestock schemes in Uruguay in the last 12 years: “This system of receiving fixed returns in dollars worked very well for at least 11 years. They paid me up to date”
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The first indication of the scandal in the Ganadera conexión occurred on November 28 last year, when a Tesla Model 3 car crashed at 211 kilometers per hour in the small town of Florida, central Uruguay. Behind the wheel was Gustavo Basso, one of the co -owners of Conexión Ganadera, who had grown a lot since its opening in 1999.
Weeks after he drove his car against a parked building vehicle, investors began reporting that their cattle scheme payments were late and in January the company confirmed that nearly $ 250 million left. In April, a coroner concluded that Basso had died from suicide.
Conexión Ganadera was one of three funds that began to warn late last year that they were unable to fulfill their obligations with the investors. They had little money, which attributed to the adverse climate (there was a drought in 2022-23) and the difficult market conditions.
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In late January, investors were striving to remove their economies amid reports of fraud. Some filed lawsuits for fraud, which led to a bankruptcy process and an official investigation by the Uruguayan money laundering prosecutor, which is still in progress. The prosecutor declined to comment to Reuters.
Pablo Carrasco, from Conexión Ganadera, denies the allegations of fraud. Lawyers representing the Ganadera conexión said they could not comment on legal proceedings until the statement was given in court. The Larrarte group lawyer said the company was fully cooperating with the authorities. The Ganadera Republic did not respond to a request for commentary from Reuters.
Politicians, radio presenters, retirees, and even priests are among the thousands of people who now try to recover their economies – and their missing “ghost” cattle, whose number is proving difficult to determine.
An inventory of the largest company, Conexión Ganadera, conducted by a bankruptcy administrator, estimated that only 70,000 to 80,000 of the 804,604 cattle that the company claimed to manage actually existed.
