De Vido was born in the
City of Buenos Aires in 1949. Enrolling at the
University of Buenos Aires School of Architecture and Urbanism, he graduated in 1974. He returned to the remote
Province of Santa Cruz, and was named Works Director within the province's Housing and Urban Development Institute in 1988 by
Justicialist Governor Héctor Marcelino García. He was promoted to the post of Provincial Highway Bureau Director in 1990. The 1991 election of
Río Gallegos Mayor
Néstor Kirchner as Governor led to de Vido's appointment as Santa Cruz's Economy Minister, in which capacity he oversaw the investment of a US$535 million payout Kirchner negotiated for his oil-rich province when
YPF, the state-owned oil concert, was privatized in 1993. Julio de Vido was elected to the
Chamber of Deputies in the
1997 midterm elections. He returned to Santa Cruz Province halfway through his term, however, and was named Minister of Government by Kirchner, securing de Vido's role as Kirchner's chief adviser. His wife, Alessandra Minnicelli, served as Director of
SIGEN, the chief
auditing office of the Argentine government, from 2003 to 2007, and the couple has been the focus of a number of investigations regarding their increasing net worth. Minister de Vido was instrumental in shaping President
Cristina Kirchner's record US$32 billion public works plan for 2009–2010. He later confirmed that the plan's headline project, the construction of the
Buenos Aires-Rosario-Córdoba high-speed railway (the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere), would be postponed in favor of developing greater
nuclear power capacity to satisfy the growing
electricity demand. He, along with Labor Minister
Carlos Tomada, became the longest-serving cabinet member in the
Kirchnerist era that began in 2003. On 16 April 2012, de Vido was appointed to head the
federal intervention of the YPF, the leading fossil fuel producer and distributor in Argentina. The company, which had been privatized in 1993 and acquired by
Repsol of
Spain in 1999, was partly renationalized amid ongoing production declines. In the
2015 general elections de Vido was elected a deputy for the
Front for Victory. On October 25, 2017, the
National Congress voted to revoke his
parliamentary immunity, after a federal judge sought to question him over alleged irregularities in the handling of public funds relating to the state-owned
coal mining company
Yacimientos Carboníferos Río Turbio. In November the same year, de Vido was detained, had parts of his assets frozen, and was prohibited from leaving the country. After more than two years of detention without the case having been brought to trial, a federal court ordered de Vido's release from custody in March 2020. In October 2018, de Vido was sentenced to five years and eight months' imprisonment, as well as barred from public office for life, for responsibility in the
2012 Buenos Aires rail disaster, in which 51 people were killed. The sentence was upheld by Argentina's Court of Cassation in December 2020. On 30 September 2025, de Vido received a four-year prison sentence for irregularities in the acquisition of 11
liquefied natural gas tankers between 2008 and 2009. ==Honours and awards==