- An investigative committee inside Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies has beneficial President Javier Milei face additional scrutiny for his position selling the ill-fated $LIBRA crypto venture.
- The report discovered 114,410 wallets misplaced cash buying and selling on $LIBRA after Milei endorsed the venture from his private X account, shortly earlier than venture insiders cashed out US$107 million price of tokens.
- The report additionally discovered Milei had earlier been concerned within the promotion of different dodgy crypto initiatives which had left buyers out of pocket.
The Argentinian Congress ought to examine whether or not President Javier Milei engaged in “misconduct in workplace” for his position within the $LIBRA cryptocurrency debacle of February 2025, in keeping with a report launched by a committee inside Argentina’s decrease home of the Nationwide Congress.
Again in February 2025, Milei promoted $LIBRA on his personal X / Twitter account, spruiking it as an modern new supply of funding for Argentine small companies. The Argentine President would later delete his promotional posts after eight wallets related to the venture cashed out to the tune of US$107 million (AU$166 million) shortly after the token’s launch.
According to information outlet El País, the parliamentary report discovered that regardless of the Argentine President’s characterisation, $LIBRA was by no means a severe venture, however was from the very starting “a memecoin beforehand designed for a rug pull by a bunch with privileged info.”
The report additionally concluded that the widespread losses incurred by retail buyers in $LIBRA — the report estimates 114,410 wallets misplaced cash buying and selling the token — weren’t merely the results of an absence of oversight, however had been additionally probably attributable to venture insiders’ “deliberate will to evade institutional controls.”
The report highlighted the centrality of Milei to the venture: “the president presumably supplied indispensable cooperation for finishing up the scheme.”
Talking to The Block, Juan Marino, an Argentine politician and secretary of the committee accountable for the report, summarised the report’s findings, reaffirming that Javier Milei — the present President of Argentina — was central to what primarily quantities to a rip-off towards common crypto buyers.
Javier Milei concerned the presidential investiture to permit the alleged $LIBRA rip-off to successfully happen: with out his tweet, $LIBRA wouldn’t have had the quantity of purchases it did.
Milei continues to keep up he did nothing improper in the course of the $LIBRA fiasco regardless of the mounting claims towards him. In Could, the Argentine President disbanded an investigative taskforce set as much as study the position he and his sister, Karina, performed in a crypto scheme simply days after a decide requested Argentina’s central financial institution to make public Javier and Karina’s Milei’s financial institution accounts.
At the moment, Milei and others concerned within the creation of $LIBRA, together with infamous American entrepreneur / scamster, Hayden Davis, face a judicial investigation in Argentina and a category motion lawsuit within the US.
Associated: First Lady’s $MELANIA Coin Under Fire: Lawsuit Alleges Massive Pump-and-Dump Scheme
$LIBRA Rip-off Wasn’t Milei’s First Rip-off Rodeo, Claims Report
Whereas the $LIBRA scandal attracted all of the headlines, the Chamber of Deputies report says there was an earlier, much less attention-grabbing token launch — additionally involving Javier Milei — which appears to ascertain a sample of crypto scams involving the Argentine President.
The investigators recognized the launch of KIP Protocol just a few months earlier than $LIBRA, in December 2024. This token launch was much like $LIBRA: Milei endorsed the token on X, and shortly afterward a venture insider — on this case, a person named Manuel Terrones Godoy — cashed out, leaving different buyers holding the bag.
The report claims similarities between these two token launches recommend that insiders on each initiatives, together with Milei and different members of his administration, deliberately and systematically undermined the oversight of regulators just like the Nationwide Securities Fee (CNV).
“In each instances, the cryptocurrencies had been launched after having obtained some kind of public validation by the President of the Nation, after which the liquidity swimming pools had been emptied, producing an abrupt drop in value,” the report claims.
“Though $KIP didn’t attain the repercussion of $LIBRA — provided that the latter counted on sustained presidential promotion by way of a tweet pinned for hours—it did set up a factual and temporal precedent.”
Associated: Hayden Davis Embroiled in New Memecoin Fiasco Amidst Legal Heat from Argentina
The report additionally discovered that Milei had endorsed different doubtful crypto initiatives, together with an NFT-based recreation known as Vulcano and a crypto agency named CoinX, which had beforehand been the goal of fraud investigations.
According to El País, members of Milei’s celebration, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), attended the committee the place the report was made public and rejected its findings.
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