[Friedrich Huebler]

The fact that the character is in there suggest it was created with v14, the fact that Ottavia can open it suggested it was saveold and sent to him.

Files in Stata format can be created by other software, not only Stata.

help whatsnew has this entry under "update 05may2015":

saveold, when the first character of a variable name was a multibyte Unicode character and when the first byte of that character would have been an invalid starting character for a variable name in an older version of Stata, issued an error message to that effect but still saved the .dta file rather than exiting with that error message. The saved .dta file could not be read by Stata. saveold now exits with an error message and does not save the file.

If this is accurate, Ottavia's file could not have been created with Stata because he is able to open it.