Defendant files complaint against federal judge over Mar del Plata online gambling and money laundering case

Guillermo Pinarello, one of the defendants in a case involving alleged clandestine online gambling and money laundering, has filed a complaint against federal judge Santiago Inchausti before Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy and has also sought to have him removed from the case. For any PSP or acquiring team watching high-risk exposure in Argentina, the point is simple: the same criminal file can also turn into a fight over judicial impartiality, procedure, and pre-trial measures.

1. Inchausti, the federal judge in Mar del Plata, is leading case file No. 16997/2023, where Pinarello is being investigated as the alleged organizer of an illicit association said to have operated online casinos without authorization and moved the proceeds into the financial system through different mechanisms, including accounts and virtual wallets.
2. In his filing to the Council of the Magistracy, Pinarello accuses the judge of possible “disciplinary breaches and/or grounds for poor performance,” including the alleged disclosure of case information while the secrecy of the file was still in force, differential treatment of different defendants, and the way a Federal Chamber ruling granting house arrest to one defendant was implemented.
3. Pinarello’s recusal request also cites what he describes as “manifest enmity” and an “objective loss of impartiality,” arguing that these factors call into question Inchausti’s ability to continue hearing the case.
4. A central part of the complaint goes back to 2016, when, according to Pinarello, Inchausti had a heated argument with his father, Elías Guillermo Pinarello, then Director of Investigations of Drug Trafficking in Mar del Plata. The filing says the judge told him the city would investigate whatever he ordered and warned that if he did not adjust to those directives, he would “last little time in the position.”
5. Pinarello says that conflict was never resolved and later spilled into the current case. To support that claim, the filing points to measures taken against his father, including a general asset freeze ordered in November 2025 and the temporary blocking of the salary account where he received his wages, even though he had not been summoned to testify until 6 August 2026.

Pinarello also challenged how he was treated compared with another defendant in the same case, Joaquín Otero Cao. According to the recusal filing, Inchausti initially granted Otero Cao house arrest and denied Pinarello’s request, a decision later overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals in Mar del Plata.