That didn't stop him to delete merits  and the above user has received merits from stingers, but he was banned before the scandal so probably not related.

So it's either that the recovery team made a mistake or the admins have been banning people for this silently and the above user is the first that has come in the open and is trying to recover his account, the others thought an appeal is a waste of time.

Out of the many reasons for getting banned I'm also really curious what happened here.