Last week, Javier Milei’s Government looked closely at the judicial future of two key allies in its first year in office: Senator Edgardo Kueider and Deputy Cristian Ritondo.
In the case of Kueider, the national senator who was detained in Paraguay when he tried to cross the border with 200 thousand dollars in cash, ended up expelled from the Senate in the middle of a fateful Thursday, because while his peers were meeting to define his future, Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado led a series of raids on properties and offices within the framework of a case for illicit enrichment. The judge, in addition, in a strong judicial movement, had requested the senator’s removal from office, to proceed with his arrest, and also permission to search his office. Now that he was expelled, Kueider no longer enjoys the privileges and if he is released in Paraguay, Arroyo Salgado will be able to move forward with his arrest if he steps on Argentine soil. Meanwhile, the now former senator is serving a kind of preventive house arrest in a luxury tower in Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, called Tierra Alta. This complex has amenities such as a pool on the terrace, barbecue area, and gym. There, Kueider is living with Iara Guinsel Costa, who was introduced in Paraguay as his secretary.
The investigation for illicit enrichment of Kueider has as one of its central axes the company Betail SA, of which the senator would have been the owner since 2019. His partner was Rodolfo Daniel González, who is known in Concordia, Entre Ríos, as a historical political leader of Peronism. González has also been a permanent employee of the Library of Congress since 2004. When Kueider took over on his bench, he requested a transfer to his office. Shortly after, González gave his 50% of the company to Kueider’s cousin, Javier Rubel.
Betail owned 3 apartments and two garages in a building in the city of Paraná for an estimated value of 700 thousand dollars. Those departments, according to investigators, would have passed into the hands of Iara Guinsel Costa, Kueider’s secretary.
Offshore. In the case of Cristian Ritondo, he was denounced along with his wife, lawyer Romina Aldana Diago, before the federal courts of Comodoro Py. The accusation is based on the findings of an investigation by the elDiarioAr portal that exposes the couple’s alleged ties with companies located in tax havens and in Florida, in addition to the purchase of properties in Miami and other areas of southern Florida, United States.
The complaint against Ritondo and Diago includes accusations of possible crimes of illicit enrichment, cover-up, bribery and influence peddling. In the particular case of Ritondo, alleged offenses linked to crimes against the economic and financial order, as well as failure to comply with the duties of a public official, are also attributed to him.
The complaint was filed by a lawyer named Jeremías Rodríguez and was assigned to federal judge Sebastián Ramos and prosecutor Eduardo Taiano. This last move in the judicial draw came into focus because a son of Taiano worked with Ritondo in the past.
The judicial document includes the results of a journalistic investigation that revealed that Ritondo’s wife appears in public and confidential records associated with a network of companies in the British Virgin Islands, Delaware and Florida. These companies would be related to the purchase of apartments in Miami and Hallandale Beach, valued at a total of 2.6 million dollars. One of the companies involved is called Goformore LLC, which in Spanish means “Let’s go for more,” one of the PRO’s campaign slogans. The company was registered in the state of Florida on June 4, 2012, with Romina Aldana Diago as member and manager.
A few months after its creation, on March 14, 2013, the company Goformore LLC bought an apartment on Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, for $580,000. The seller was another Argentine: Juan Alberto Pazo, the current head of ARCA (former AFIP). Pazo owned the apartment through the company Harbor House 1533 Corp, of which he was president.
This apartment, according to journalistic investigation, was sold in 2014 for a value of $650,000, generating a profit with respect to the purchase price. At that same time, Diago established the Warwick Trust and activated a company in the British Virgin Islands, called Sunstar Point, to safeguard another property in Florida valued at a similar figure.
Goformore LLC also acquired three other properties in Miami between January 2013 and July 2015 for a figure that would be around $1.5 million.
Both complaints arise in the context of the Clean Record project, which could not be discussed in Deputies. The Government for now would be harmed, because the first two targeted are its allies, but from X accounts attributed to Santiago Caputo they assume that all deputies and senators are corrupt. When it became known that Kueider was being expelled, from the account @MileiEmperador, assigned to the advisor, they wrote: “I have prepared my entire life to dismiss the entire Congress and call special elections.” It remains to be seen if expelling legislators with legal cases will become a constant during this administration.
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