Argentina's Milei provided 'essential collaboration' for Libra project, congressional report finds

An investigative committee within the Argentine Chamber of Deputies has released a scathing final report on the collapse of the Libra cryptocurrency, recommending that the National Congress evaluate whether President Javier Milei incurred "misconduct in office" for his role in promoting the token.

Milei had promoted the Libra cryptocurrency, intended to bootstrap funding into domestic small businesses, with an X post from his personal account that he later deleted after 8 wallets related to the Libra team cashed out $107 million.

The report, titled "$LIBRA WAS NOT AN ISOLATED EVENT," concludes that the widespread losses associated with the token were not merely the result of poor oversight, but arguably the result of a "deliberate will to evade institutional controls."

A summary of the 200-page report's final considerations, provided to The Block by Juan Marino, an Argentine politician and the secretary of the investigative committee, concluded, "Javier Milei involved the presidential investiture to allow the alleged $LIBRA scam to effectively take place: without his tweet, $LIBRA would not have had the volume of purchases it did."

Milei has denied wrongdoing in the scandal and, in May, disbanded an investigative task force set up by his office to probe the Libra scandal and its connections to Milei and his sister, Karina Milei, days after a judge asked Argentina's Central Bank to unseal both the president's and his sister's bank accounts. 

Milei and the Libra founders, including American entrepreneur Hayden Davis, are facing a judicial investigation in Argentina, as well as a class action lawsuit from Burwick Law, a New York-based firm specializing in cryptocurrency scams.

The report alleges that 114,410 wallets lost money trading Libra. 

A "pattern" of misbehavior

While the Libra collapse in February 2025 drew the most international attention, the committee’s report outlines a pattern of behavior beginning months earlier. Investigators flagged the launch of the KIP Protocol in December 2024 as a factual precedent.

According to the committee, President Milei publicly validated KIP shortly before its liquidity pools were drained, a sequence of events that repeated with $LIBRA. On-chain analysis cited in the report alleges that operator Manuel Terrones Godoy converted $KIP tokens to USDT and transferred funds to associate Mauricio Novelli on the same day as the token’s public launch.

The committee stated that this repetition "makes plausible the hypothesis" that the administration systematically bypassed technical bodies like the National Securities Commission (CNV) to facilitate these projects.

"In both cases, the cryptocurrencies were launched after having received some type of public validation by the President of the Nation, after which the liquidity pools were emptied, generating an abrupt drop in price," the report states.

Milei's promotion of the KIP protocol has not previously received the same level of scrutiny as the Libra scandal. "Although $KIP did not reach the repercussion of $LIBRA — given that the latter counted on sustained presidential promotion via a tweet pinned for hours—it did establish a factual and temporal precedent," the report states. 

The committee also found that Milei had promoted an NFT game called "Vulcano," created by Novelli, and "CoinX," a company raided by the Judiciary in the context of a fraud investigation initiated in 2022. 

Legislators from Milei's party La Libertad Avanza reportedly attended the Tuesday meeting of the investigative committee, according to El País, and " rejected the report and argued that the opposition did not secure enough support to move it forward," though the lawmakers did not present an alternate proposal.