Manuel Adorni, Milei’s chief of staff cornered by a corruption scandal, resigns

End. The agonizing fall, by chapters, of Manuel Adorni ended this Saturday. Javier Milei accepted the resignation of his Chief of Staff, investigated by Justice for alleged illicit enrichment for almost four months and protagonist of the biggest scandal of his Executive. The Argentine president had already replaced him as spokesman, but He refused to give in anymore. and maintained protection over who was one of his most trusted men. He changed his mind when even his sister and Secretary of the Presidency, Karina Milei, withdrew her support.

Adorni made his step aside public through a letter addressed to Milei and published on his networks. “Thank you for, this time, accepting my resignation from office,” he wrote. Until today, the head of ministers accused the press of being responsible for his decision: “The endless The media attacks that I have endured have led me to have to ask you to accompany me this time, so that I can close this cycle in order to protect myself and my family. The media operations have gone to the extreme, not only against me, but against my wife, my small children, my friends, my family and even my neighbors and relatives.”

Adorni came to government as a outsider without political experience, like a large part of the ruling party, La Libertad Avanza. He rose through the party structure quickly thanks to Karina Milei, whom his brother calls The Boss and usually has the last word on the political decisions of the Executive. In public, Karina fired Adorni with a message in which she described him as “an upright, valuable and very loved person.” Privately, the president had long been between a rock and a hard place. The judicial case against the chief of ministers advanced with new suspicions every week, polls showed that eight out of ten Argentines wanted him to resign and the rejection of his figure among parliamentary allies had turned him into a stopper that prevented bills from being approved in Congress.

The Chief of Staff is the interlocutor between the Government and the Legislature, and is obliged to appear once a month before the legislators to defend the management. With Adorni, the bridges between both powers were broken and no one was moving to repair them. The main government partners They threatened to vote in favor of an opposition motion of censure to remove him. There was even explicit criticism from members of his own party, concerned that the image that Adorni conveyed was too similar to that of that caste that they promised to fight when they came to power in 2023: a politician who used the presidential plane to travel with family —his wife, Betina Angeletti—; that he barely could left in jet private to the most exclusive coastal city in Uruguay, Punta del Este; who spent Christmas in five-star hotels on the Caribbean island of Aruba while the Government cut down the State with a chainsaw; and that he made large cash payments that were impossible to justify with his salary.

The last straw was not an exorbitant expense, like the $250,000 (220,000 euros) that Adorni spent—in cash and without an invoice, according to the contractor—to renovate one of the two homes acquired as a senior government official, but rather another much smaller one: a monitor and two projectors for video games that he bought for an amount equivalent to about $4,500 in August of last year. According to Justice investigation, this purchase, which almost doubled his salary as presidential spokesperson, was made online from his account, but with the credit cards of two of his employees. He is also suspected of using another employee to pay $6,800 in June last year for bed bases and sheets.

The new revelation coincided with another frustrated session in the Senate. The head of the ruling bloc, Patricia Bullrich, preferred to suspend the debate on Thursday on the law on the inviolability of private property – which eliminates current restrictions on the purchase of land by foreigners – rather than risk the opposition gathering the votes to question Adorni. Bullrich informed Karina Milei that he could not repeat the strategy for another week and that the allies were determined to support a motion of censure if the president kept his chief of staff in office.

The Government believed that the scandal would die down as the weeks went by, but that was not the case. The Argentines first found out that Adorni had bought an apartment thanks to the credit granted by two retirees; Shortly after, it was learned that he had also bought a house in a private neighborhood thanks to the credit of two policewomen. From there, revelations of luxury trips and expenses exceeding half a million dollars followed. Time and time again, Milei came out to stand up for him.

The World Cup, the last of the captain of the albiceleste team, Lionel Messi, did not divert attention either. Adorni chose the eve of the football event to present his last asset declaration and rectify the two previous ones. He included half a million dollars in them that he had omitted. In parallel, he gave a television interview: he said that he obtained that money from profits on investments in cryptocurrencies almost a decade ago. His statements aimed to change the focus of the judicial investigation: the penalties for tax evasion are lower than the penalties for alleged corruption crimes. But admitting that he hid money from the treasury also meant admitting that he had lied. In March, to journalists, to whom he responded that he had everything in order. At the end of April, before Congress, when he insisted that he had all his assets declared. That day, from a box in the Chamber of Deputies, Milei encouraged him, while he directed furious insults at the journalists.

The first sign of backing down was to strip Adorni of his role as spokesperson. Last week, Milei replaced him with an economist from the far-right Faro Foundation, Adrián Ravier. This Thursday, the president was in Spain when Karina Milei accepted that the continuity of the Chief of Staff was an insurmountable obstacle to regaining control of the agenda and carrying out the new battery of laws with which the Government wants to deepen the deregulation of the economy and attract private investments in new industries, such as artificial intelligence.

The recent appearance of videos showing wads of 100 dollar bills kept in the dressing room of former Kirchner leader Martín Insaurralde It had an unexpected boomerang effect for a Government that defends “morality as a state policy.” Polls showed that some Argentines equated both scandals, despite the disproportion: there appear to be several million dollars that are kept in the closet of Insaurralde, who is remembered for the luxurious yacht vacation in the Mediterranean that cost him his job.

Adorni was Milei’s third chief of staff. He remained for just over half a year, after replacing Guillermo Francos. The name that sounds the most now is that of the current Minister of the Interior, Diego Santilli. Coming from Pro, the party founded by Mauricio Macri, he is one of the most experienced men in the Cabinet. The president trusts him to turn the page and return to the path lost in recent months.