In an interview in June 2025 Milei’s former personal lawyer, Diego Spagnuolo, was speaking to the mother of a child with a disability saying: “Just because you had a disabled child, that’s your family’s problem, not a state issue.” Diego Spagnuolo is the Director of the Argentine “National Agency for Disabled People” (ANDIS, by its Spanish initials). At the express request of the president Javier Milei the job had been given to his personal lawyer. Now Spagnuolo was invoking the president’s Chainsaw mechanism cutting benefits for disable children, in this case, a cute smart autistic bespectacled 12-year-old called Ian Moche, her kid.
Recent leaks of a sound recording of a conversation between Spagnuolo and another have sparked lawsuits that indicate that while Spagnuolo was saving pennies in children’s health services he knew all about illegal payments in the millions per month to the president’s family from public health purchases of drugs from laboratories, endemic corruption in his own Department of Health. In the audio we can hear him telling his dinner partner that he had all of Milei’s sister’s WhatsApp audio message recorded, that they were stealing money and that he was not taking the fall.
The audio leak is very revealing indeed. It will present acute difficulties for Javier Milei and for his sister Karina who is Secretary to the President (who just happens to be her brother). Spagnuolo, the tapes reveal, was aware of flows of bribes happening between the powerful pharmaceutical laboratory sector and members of Javier Milei’s own government. These flows were being run by a team set up, the lawyer indicates, by the previous government operative team from former president Macri. “They’re on the take he emphasises.” (Están chorreando”). In the audio he lawyer tells how the take was been divided 1%, 3%, 5%, 8% and much more when the drugs are discounted. This bribe money was split but the main part of it was going — according to Spagnuolo, to the presidents office— to Milei’s sister.
According to the legal filing, filed Wednesday 20th August in Buenos Aires with Criminal Federal court 11. Listed on the filing are Javier and his sister Karina Milei, Spagnuolo (of course) and two alleged beneficiaries and/or co-conspirators mentioned explicitly in the recording. One is the head of a chain of pharmacies (a man who is reported to have an excellent Ferrari collection) Eduardo Kovalivker, a pharmacist trained in Israel who is head of Suizo Argentina (a local firm that handles pharmaceutical products). The last person in the list is Carlos Menem-Menem (nephew of the former president of Argentina) Carlos Saúl Menem (RIP).
Martín Menem (another nephew of the deceased president) is a key player in Milei’s government. He has been very useful to Milei protecting him from another legal matter involving the theft of $280Mn. in a rug pull crypto-fraud for a “utility coin” called $Libra (locally referred to as the “Cryptogate” controversy). The utility-coin (supposedly to promote business in Argentina) was promoted by the President himself from his twitter account. It has embroiled him in lawsuits in the US and Argentina from angry investors who lost the 1/4 billion i the rug-pull. Martín Menem has been preventing the formation of a house investigation commission into this fraud by manipulating quorums in the house of representatives that he chairs. Carlos Saúl is considered ‘jinxed’ because of the chaos he caused with financial collapse of 2001, so much so that it is considered extremely bad luck to say his surname out loud . Carlos Saúl famously also drove a red Ferrari back in the free wheeling 1980’s.
Some calculations based on the numbers mentioned in the leaked audios indicate a bare minimal monthly take for the Milei family, if proven to be true, were at least a half million to $800,000 USD Monthly 2024 prices. The price of local medications have jumped about 250% since Milei took office a year and half ago. Now some of that profit, it seems, bubbled up to the top to Ms. Milei’s funds; which may also be part of the reason no price controls were put on national drug supplies and why those in existence had been largely eliminated, even for monopolized drugs with no competition.
When Milei took power his original plan was to put the Department of Health in his new mega Government Department which Milei calls “Human Capital”. Milei hates public health because he’s a libertarian and only believes that health should be private (and only if you can afford it). It was the power of the Argentine pharmaceutical laboratories that pulled the Department of Health back out of Human Capital because the labs had arrangements to supply pharmaceuticals with public hospitals and other institutions. Maybe with the release of this audio clip we shall now understand more as to what kind of arrangements had been set up. Spagnuolo was explicit that specific purchase arrangements have been funneled (probably illegally) through Kovalivker’s chain of pharmacies called Suizo Argentina linked to the Menem family.
Milei has become favoured by certain people who are tired of corruption but it will be difficult for him to explain his own family corruption in this case if he’s found guilty. He faces mid-term elections in a few months and this will not help so it increases the chance that his own party will push him and his sister aside as a liability before then.
– Nepotism (jobs for your sister and for your personal lawyer)
– Humanism (zero, kids with problems don’t matter; it’s the mother’s fault)
– Corruption (check!)
– Social service (zero, the state must be destroyed once my sister and my lawyer suck some more money out of it)
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