Manuel Adorni, Argentina’s cabinet chief and spokesman for President Javier Milei, recently amended his asset declarations to include roughly $513,000 in Bitcoin profits. He says the windfall came from a $200,000 investment made with his wife between 2013 and 2018, generating about $300,000 in gains that he simply hadn’t disclosed before.
The numbers don’t match
When analysts examined one of Adorni’s wallets, they found profits of roughly $60,000 from transactions made during 2017 and 2018. That’s a far cry from the $300,000 in gains he reported in his amended filings.
The amended declarations were filed around June 10-11, which is notable timing. Adorni is currently the subject of an illicit enrichment investigation being conducted by prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita and judge Ariel Lijo.
Several prominent early Bitcoin adopters in Argentina have raised a more fundamental objection: the practical reality of buying $200,000 worth of Bitcoin in Argentina during the period Adorni references would have been extraordinarily difficult. In 2013 and 2014, Argentina’s Bitcoin market was tiny. Liquidity was limited, over-the-counter options were scarce, and moving that kind of money into crypto would have required navigating a landscape that barely existed.
