New fine on an exchange house: they believe that the “roller” with the dollar in Alberto’s government can reach US$ 1.5 billion

The summary that the Superintendence of Financial Entities closed last February involves the Stema exchange house. It is not a new name in the general scheme that the monetary authority is investigating regarding maneuvers with the exchange rate between 2022 and 2023. It had already appeared in previous summaries of other exchange houses also indicated for similar operations.

It is a mechanism that an important official office called “the little staircase”. It is a circuit that, they consider, It worked very smoothly between 2022 and 2023. It coincided with the gradual tightening of exchange controls and the beginning of the dollar authorization scheme for imports with the SIRA system.

An official described that “ladder” It came from a commercial bank that obtained dollars at the official price, sold them to exchange houses and these, in turn, sold them to other. This passing of hands could be repeated, and at a certain point in the circuit cash withdrawals were made, which clouded the traceability of those currencies.

Estimates from researchers within the Government came to calculate that, in total, This scheme involved up to US$ 1.5 billionof which the 84% are dollars for which traceability was lost. At the end of 2023, the Executive Branch assures, the maneuver stopped.

In the last summary completed on this issue, in February, the BCRA reconstructed that Stema deployed a scheme in which it bought dollars at the official exchange rate and then sold them to other exchange operators. In total, The operation involved about US$ 180 million between January and June 2023.

The summary also details that those dollars were withdrawn in cash on the same day they were credited to Stema accounts, which “lose the bank traceability of the foreign currency acquired”.

In turn, the operators who bought these currencies—among them firms like Andie SRL, Gallo Cambios, Soy Vos SAS, Dibehi SAS, Gis Cambio or Dique 4— They then channeled the dollars to other actors, in many cases without justifying the origin of the funds in pesos.

In the context of strong exchange restrictions, the Central concluded that it was a mechanism that, although formally framed as the purchase and sale of banknotes, had another objective: “Acquire foreign currency at official values ​​to then be used to supply the parallel market,” where the dollar was quoted at double the price.

Previously, three financial summaries completed between October and the beginning of last December gave an account of this scheme, which took place between 2022 and the end of 2023, during the mandate of Alberto Fernández in the Casa Rosada, Sergio Massa in the Ministry of Economy and Miguel Pesce in the BCRA.

The Central mentions three exchange houses among its final resolutions: Gallo Cambios, Mega Latina and Concordia Inversiones. The latter is linked to both Ariel Vallejothe owner of South Financelike his mother Graciela Vallejo.

In the Gallo Cambios file, the monetary authority detected operations for a total of 474 million dollarswhich were not intended for clients themselves but for other exchange operators. 90% obtained dollars from two other operators, Mega Latina (also investigated by the BCRA) and Stema Cambios.

He sold those dollars, in turn, to 13 other operators. Nine of those 13 entities, in this framework, have already been disqualified. Gallo Cambios received peso transfers and in exchange sold dollars. The peculiarity is that almost all of these currencies (92%) were delivered in banknotes to the buyers.

Another file closed by the Central is against the exchange operator Mega Latina. The meaning of the investigation is similar: the channeling of dollars obtained at the official price to the parallel market.

In this case the amount amounts to 460 million dollars, between January 2022 and August 2023. The Central considered that the authorization that Mega Latina had “was used as a screen or legal curtain to develop an extensive anti-regulatory exchange operation.”

Both in Stema and in Gallo and Mega Latina, the Banco de Servicios y Transacciones (BST) is mentioned as the commercial bank providing the dollars in the first instance. Sources close to the company assure that the operation of selling foreign currency to client exchange houses is a regular and legal operation, and that the purchase and sale of dollars at the official price is done with permanent monitoring by the BCRA.