Argentina Cabinet Chief Says Undisclosed Assets Came From Bitcoin Profits

Manuel Adorni, Argentina’s cabinet chief, is facing controversy over previously undisclosed assets worth several hundred thousand dollars. Adorni said the assets came from profits on Bitcoin investments, but questions have been raised over whether the trading records he disclosed match that explanation and his past public remarks.

Forbes reported on June 13 that Adorni said in a recent interview with local media that he entered the Bitcoin market in 2013 and began investing actively in 2014. He said he and his wife invested about $200,000 and earned about $300,000 in profit.

The explanation came after a wide gap emerged between the assets in his revised filing and those he reported when he entered the presidential office. When he joined the government as presidential spokesperson in December 2023, he disclosed assets of only about $24,000. In a revised filing, he said his actual holdings at the time totaled about $530,000.

The revised filing drew particular scrutiny because Adorni identified the source of the assets as gains from earlier Bitcoin investments.

Local media reported discrepancies between the transaction history Adorni disclosed and his explanation. He said he bought 15 Bitcoin in 2017 and sold all of them in 2018, but blockchain analysis showed the profit from those trades was only about $60,000.

His earlier remarks added to the controversy. In a 2020 lecture, Adorni said he first encountered Bitcoin five to six years earlier and noted that it was trading at about $6,000 at the time. That account does not align with his more recent claim that he began investing in 2013 and 2014.

Early Bitcoin investors in Argentina also questioned his explanation. Franco Amati, an early Bitcoin adopter, said buying $100,000 worth of Bitcoin in Argentina in 2014 was extremely rare and not easy to carry out.