Federal prosecutors and FBI agents have begun taking testimony in the United States about the AFA’s finances, turning a long-running file into an active preliminary probe. Investigators are trying to reconstruct how the association moved hundreds of millions of dollars through U.S. accounts and whether any of it crossed the line into money laundering or fraud under U.S. jurisdiction.
The timing matters because Claudio "Chiqui" Tapia is in the United States following the national team while authorized to travel after posting a multimillion-dollar bond in a separate case at home. That puts the man at the center of the AFA on the same side of the Atlantic as the investigators now testing how the money moved.
Banking documentation reviewed by La Nación points to at least $260 million moving through accounts opened at Citibank, Synovus, Bank of America, JP Morgan and PNC Bank, while the broader figure under review is around $300 million. Only part of that sum can be matched directly to operating expenses, and another $57 million was allegedly sent on to various companies whose route and destination are still being analyzed. The size of the flow is why the case has drawn the Department of Justice, three federal prosecutors and FBI agents based in Washington, DC and the Southern District of Florida.
TourProdEnter LLC sits at the center of the preliminary file, together with Erica Gillette, who handled the collection of AFA international commercial contracts in recent years, including agreements with Adidas and Warner. That commercial trail is what investigators are now following as they try to separate ordinary business activity from transactions that may have been layered or redirected through the banking system. The inquiry began to take shape during 2025 and is now being handled by Patrick Gushue, Christopher Ting and Michael Berger.
The shift is notable because the case did not look this way in September 2024. After Patricia Bullrich’s Argentine Ministry of Security warned U.S. authorities about suspicious financial movements linked to the AFA, the FBI said there was not enough evidence to open a criminal investigation. The file later grew with new banking documentation and complaints pushed by Guillermo Tofoni at the beginning of 2026, giving investigators enough material to move from a warning to testimony-taking.
What comes next is more important than the paperwork already gathered. The Department of Justice is weighing whether to summon former officials from Javier Milei’s government, which would pull the probe closer to the political response that surrounded the first alert. For Tapia, the risk is no longer abstract: the money trail is now being tested inside the United States, and the question is no longer whether the file exists, but how far it can go.
