The Supreme Court of Justice upheld four convictions for criminal association in the case known as the "Gold Mafia", a state fraud in the 1990s that allowed for the recovery of undue tax refunds of about 20 million dollars through simulated commercial operations. Judges Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz, and Ricardo Lorenzetti rejected the appeals filed by the defense as inadmissible and confirmed the sentences of three years in prison for Mario Jorge Grinschpun, Luis Eduardo Ricigliano, Edgardo Enrique Roggenbau, and Carlos Axel Augspach for the crime of criminal association. In parallel, the highest court also dismissed the claim by the AFIP, which acted as a complainant, against the decision of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation that had declared the crime of defrauding the public administration time-barred. According to the Argentine News Agency, the investigation focused on the activities of the so-called "Piana Group", whose members set up a corporate structure to simulate commercial operations between different firms in the circuit of commercialization of products destined for export. In this way, they took advantage of the benefits regime provided for in the Value Added Tax law for exports, which allowed them to obtain tax refunds that had never actually entered the state coffers. The investigated events occurred over 30 years ago, between 1993 and 1995. In a previous stage of the proceedings, in February 2014, the Oral Economic Crimes Court convicted the main executives of Casa Piana. Enrique Piana received six years in prison for 19 counts of defrauding the public administration and criminal association as leader and organizer, a sentence that was unified into eight years and two months for a previous conviction. Miguel Seligman was sentenced to three years in suspended sentence as a member of the organization. Oral trial The second part of the case went to an oral trial in 2017, when sentences of three years of conditional execution and fines were handed down for criminal association to Augspach, Guillermo Jorge Campbell, Grinschpun, Roggenbaum, and Ricigliano, while Marcelo De Laurentis and Alberto Giusti received two years of conditional execution for necessary participation in defrauding the public administration. Subsequently, Chamber IV of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation reviewed the case. In 2022 it ratified the convictions for criminal association, although it finally considered the crime of fraud time-barred, after a new ruling issued after the Supreme Court had annulled a previous resolution for lack of "logical-legal unity". Finally, the highest court rejected the appeals filed by the defenses against the convictions for criminal association and also the claims of the complainant that insisted on maintaining the accusation for fraud.
