Villarruel rejects Adorni's Bitcoin wealth explanation as 'shameful'

Manuel Adorni, Argentina's Cabinet Chief, submitted a sworn financial declaration to the courts claiming he had earned $300,000 in Bitcoin profits from an initial $200,000 investment made between 2013 and 2018. The declaration came as part of a judicial investigation into potential illicit enrichment—a serious accusation that prompted Adorni to reconstruct and justify the origins of his wealth in meticulous detail. But within hours of his public explanation, Vice President Victoria Villarruel dismissed his account entirely, calling his conduct and reasoning "shameful."

Adorni's defense, laid out in an interview with La Nación +, was granular and specific. He described buying Bitcoin in August 2017 at $3,356 per coin, then again at $3,000 and $7,233. He detailed liquidating ten coins five months later in March 2018 at $8,224 each, and eventually closing out his entire wallet for $6,000. The precision was deliberate: each transaction, he argued, could be traced through the cryptographic keys tied to the virtual wallets he had used, allowing the courts to verify every movement and confirm the investments were real.

When asked about the original $200,000, Adorni explained it was money he and his wife had set aside over decades of private-sector work—savings accumulated for their children's education and future. He acknowledged the funds had never been formally declared to tax authorities. "We saved in cash, like all Argentines do," he said. He framed this not as evasion but as a rational response to Argentina's political climate: staying out of the formal system was, in his view, a way to escape the old guard's reach. "It never would have occurred to me to save officially, especially not in those years," he added.

Adorni's amended declaration also included revisions to his wife Bettina Angeletti's financial profile. She had worked as a freelancer but also held a managerial position at a private company for more than fifteen years—income streams that required documentation and reconstruction. The filing, according to sources close to the Cabinet office, represented a comprehensive retracing of the family's economic trajectory: inherited assets, property movements, business dealings from their time in the private sector, and all income earned before Adorni took office on December 10, 2023.

Yet Villarruel's swift and public rejection of this narrative suggested the explanation had failed to persuade at least one powerful figure in government. When a user on X asked for her view on Adorni's recent statements, the Senate President did not hedge. "His conduct and explanations seem shameful to me," she wrote. The comment was brief but unmistakable—a vice president openly questioning the credibility of her government's chief of staff during an active investigation.

Adorni had anticipated skepticism. "I am not a thief, and everything I did was through legitimate work," he stated flatly. "I never held public office until December 10, 2023, and neither did my wife." The declaration was his attempt to prove it. Whether the courts—and whether Villarruel—would accept that proof remained an open question. The Bitcoin transactions could be verified through the blockchain. The question was whether verification would be enough to close the investigation, or whether doubt had already taken root.