Casación closes the IMF loan case
The Fourth Chamber of Argentina's Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation has made final the dismissal of the complaint against former president Mauricio Macri and former officials of his government over the $57.1 billion agreement with the International Monetary Fund. The decision came after Raúl Omar Pleé, the general prosecutor before the chamber, gave up the appeal that sought to reverse the closure. The case had examined whether the borrowing under the Cambiemos administration was used to finance capital flight and whether officials or third parties obtained improper economic benefits.[S1]
The chamber, made up of judges Javier Carbajo, Gustavo Hornos and Mariano Borinsky, treated the prosecutor's complaint as abandoned and rejected a separate filing by Antonio Conrado De Martino, who had tried to join the appeal brought by the Public Ministry. The ruling did not rest on a full review of the merits by Casación, but on the withdrawal of the prosecution's challenge.[S1][S2]
What the complaint alleged
The investigation had been opened to examine possible abuse of authority, failure to fulfill the duties of a public official, fraudulent administration to the detriment of the public administration and misappropriation of public funds. Besides Macri, in his capacity as president, the file covered the actions of Federico Sturzenegger, Luis Caputo and Guido Sandleris, who successively headed the Central Bank; Nicolás Dujovne, former economy minister; and Gustavo Cañonero, Verónica Rappoport, Enrique Szewach and Mauro Alessandro, members of the monetary authority's monetary policy committee.[S1]
The aim was to establish whether the IMF loan had sustained a process of external asset formation that could not have continued on the same terms without that inflow of foreign currency. The ruling described the object of the investigation as the possibility that a borrowing cycle had been launched not for the purposes formally declared in the documents signed with the IMF, but mainly to obtain foreign currency for later flight. The complaint also sought to determine whether that operation had harmed the state and whether the officials involved had obtained improper economic advantages.[S1][S2]
Why the prosecutor dropped the appeal
The central point of the resolution is the opinion of Pleé, who on October 14 withdrew the complaint filed by the general prosecutor before the federal appeals court in Buenos Aires. The representative of the Public Ministry held that the prosecution's hypotheses did not follow logically from the evidence gathered and that no concrete measures had been proposed that could sustain the investigation. In his opinion he stated that the hypotheses presented by the trial prosecutor did not correspond to logical inferences from the case record, obtained after an extensive investigation.[S1][S2]
Pleé also questioned the lack of precision on how to move forward in tracing the funds. He argued that the dispute was not about the result the prosecutors hoped to reach but about the steps needed to achieve it, and said the trial prosecutor Franco Picardi had raised the lack of traceability in general terms without explaining how to overcome it. The prosecutor added that the accusation confused the absence of accounting support with the existence of a specific legal violation, and concluded that the measures taken and information gathered over five years showed no criminal norm had been breached, so the proceedings should not continue.[S1][S2]
The earlier rulings and the citizen's challenge
The dismissal had already been ordered on February 2, 2026, by Federal Criminal and Correctional Court No. 5 under article 195 of the national code of criminal procedure. On September 4, Chamber I of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Appeals Court confirmed the closure, and on September 25 it declared inadmissible the cassation appeal filed by the general prosecutor before that court. The prosecution then took its complaint to Casación, but Pleé withdrew it.[S1][S2]
The chamber rejected De Martino's filing on the grounds that he was not a formal party to the case and had not been admitted as a complainant. He had merely joined a filing by the Public Ministry before Casación, an accessory step that depended on a main appeal granted and pending. Because the prosecution's appeal had been declared inadmissible and Pleé later withdrew the complaint, and because De Martino had not filed an independent challenge, the court found no valid appellate route for his claim. The judges also held that he had not shown direct and personal harm from the facts under investigation, and they referred the case to the public bar association to assess the professional conduct of his lawyer.[S2]
