A few days ago I posted a warning on Facebook about a cryptocurrency scheme called $MARI that recently launched in the Commonwealth. Around the same time, Senator Celina Babauta doing her job, began publicly sharing what her own due diligence had turned up about a separate but adjacent project, Marianas Rai Corporation (MRC).
Let me be clear: the senator never said $MARI and MRC were the same project. She shared information about MRC separately, in a public thread about crypto activity in the Commonwealth.
Discussing related concerns in the same conversation is not the same as claiming they are the same project. I never linked them either. We each spoke about what we each found, from our own public sources.
Then Anthony Torres showed up and accused the senator of “conflating these two completely separate initiatives.”
That accusation is the opposite of what happened. She did not conflate them. He is conflating his accusation with reality in order to manufacture a “correction” he can demand.
Mr. Torres is a 90,000-share equity holder in Marianas Rai Corporation, as documented in MRC’s own 2024 annual corporate report filed with the CNMI Registrar of Corporations. On the senator’s public thread, he called her posts “ignorant or misleading,” demanded she “correct the record immediately and publicly,” and called her work an “egregious failure.”
So I have one public question for Mr. Torres:
What, specifically, needs to be corrected?
If your claim is that the senator “conflated” $MARI with MRC, you should show us where. Quote the sentence. Show the post. Point to the words. You can’t, because she didn’t. I shared info about one project. She shared separate documents about another. Two separate posts. Two separate concerns. That is the opposite of conflation.
And even setting that aside every other fact she shared came from documents you filed. So which of those is wrong?
Is the 90,000-share figure wrong? Then tell us why. Has the number gone up since the 2024 report? Did you acquire more shares? Or did it go down? File the amended report and end the confusion.
Is the stipulated injunction wrong? Then point us to the order lifting it.
Demanding a “correction” without specifying what is incorrect is not a request for accuracy. It is a request for silence.
In my opinion, here is the appropriate resolution: If Mr. Torres holds any government appointment, board seat, or commission alongside his equity stake in Marianas Rai Corporation, he should choose. Divest the equity, or step down from the government role. One or the other.
A private citizen is entitled to hold equity in a fintech company. A public official is entitled to shape Commonwealth policy. No one is entitled to do both at the same time especially not while a related project from the same corporation is currently under stipulated injunction by the CNMI Supreme Court.
And I want to ask the people of the Commonwealth a direct question:
Is it fair that a single individual can hold shares in a private cryptocurrency corporation and simultaneously hold government appointments that shape the rules for every other company trying to operate in that sector?
If the rules he helps shape make it harder for others to compete, his corporation profits. If the rules he helps shape make it easier for his corporation to operate, his corporation profits.
Heads he wins. Tails everyone else loses.
This isn’t governance. This is playing Monopoly with the board in your pocket.
Is that the Commonwealth we want? Is that the economy our children inherit?
One more thing.
On the same day Mr. Torres was publicly attacking the senator, he sent me a Facebook friend request. I do not know Anthony Torres. I have never met him. There is no rational basis for someone who is publicly calling another citizen’s research based on facts a “failure” to then privately friend-request a citizen they have never met.
That is not dialogue. That is the architecture of the rooms beginning to do its work. The rooms do not silence critics by threatening them. The rooms silence critics by absorbing them. By the time you’ve had three meetings and accepted four lunches, you no longer write what you were going to write because now it would burn relationships you didn’t have when you started.
The public attack on the senator was the architecture showing its teeth. The private friend request to me was the architecture extending its hand. I am not going inside a private room or DM to have a conversation with you. I did not accept the friend request, and I will not. If Mr. Torres has something to say to me, he can say it in the same public forum where he chose to attack the senator who was doing her job.
To Senator Babauta: you did your job. Every CNMI resident watching this should ask themselves what specifically you said that was untrue. If they can’t answer, they aren’t reacting to your conduct. They are reacting to the discomfort of someone who refuses to play by the rules of the rooms.
I am a private citizen. No party. No campaign. No government contracts. Nothing to gain except the kind of Commonwealth my family would be proud to call home.
I am not sitting down. I am not going quiet. The questions stay on the table until they are answered with documents and not with adjectives.
I will be the biggest problem the architecture faces if it comes to that.
– Nathan Mario Roppul
Nathan Mario Roppul is a Chamolinian software engineer and the technical co-founder of Islander Connect. He grew up between Saipan and Oregon and currently writes from the diaspora in Oregon.
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