‘$LIBRA’ case: Prosecutor seeks probe of phones belonging to Javier Milei, Karina Milei

A prosecutor in Argentina has ordered an investigation into the personal mobile telephones of President Javier Milei and Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei as part of an ongoing probe into alleged criminal wrongdoing in the promotion of the ‘$LIBRA’ cryptocurrency.

Eduardo Taiano, the federal prosecutor investigating the alleged responsibility of President Milei and his sister in the scandal wants to know the contents of the messages exchanged with Hayden Davis, Mauricio Novelli, Manuel Terrones Godoy and others involved in the controversial launch of $LIBRA, a so-called "memecoin," in the days prior to February 14 when the President posted his support for the cryptocurrency on the X social network.

The telephone of Sergio Morales, advisor back in February to the CNV (Comisión Nacional de Valores), Argentina’s equivalent of the Securities & Exchange Commission in the United States, is also to be scanned in order to learn what Morales and the Milei siblings agreed with different people linked to the cryptofraud investigation.

The latter include Argentines Novelli and Terrones Godoy, the organisers of a Tech Forum event in Buenos Aires; US citizen Hayden Davis, CEO of Kelsier Ventures; Polish citizen Bartosz Lipinski, CEO of Cube Exchange; and Julian Peh, CEO of Kip Protocol, a native of Singapore whose real name is Peh Chyi Haur.

All of the aforementioned individuals met President Milei at the Casa Rosada after December 2023, when the La Libertad Avanza took office.

The prosecution in the case has asked for not only the messages but also the photos in the mobile telephones during the period under study to be reviewed.

Taiano has asked the forensic experts to analyse the telephones, when confiscated, to establish whether there were messages between President Milei and Davis, Novelli and Terrones Godoy.

The prosecutor’s decision also covers the messages which might have been exchanged between Karina Milei and then-CNV advisor Sergio Morales..

The telephones to which the prosecutor is referring were confiscated from their owners on March 6, some three weeks after the cryptocurrency fraud launched on February 14. 

The contents of the mobile telephones have already been “extracted” and are in the hands of the investigators, according to the Wednesday edition of La Nación newspaper.

The prosecutor has requested the analysis of the Dirección General de Investigaciones and Apoyo Tecnológico a la Investigación Penal detective departments to determine their contents and their relation to the $LIBRA project.

The resolution orders the analysis of all the conversations in these telephones, both between individuals and in groups.

According to Taiano, communications must be traced in the totality of message apps used, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter) and LinkedIn, as well as text messages.

– TIMES/NA