On February 14, 2025, President Javier Milei promoted the ‘$LIBRA’ cryptocurrency on his X social media account. Hours later, the memecoin collapsed, causing multimillion-dollar losses for more than 44,000 investors in Argentina and around the world.
A year on from that social media post – which the President later said in an interview with the Todo Noticias (TN) news channel he had shared “as a citizen” – Argentina’s courts have still not summoned either witnesses or suspects in the case brought by affected investors.
Several weeks ago, Chamber I of the Buenos Aires Federal Court of Appeals ordered Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi to update the amounts subject to seizure within the next 90 days.
The ruling, signed by appellate judges Leopoldo Bruglia and Pablo Bertuzzi, responds to a request from the private prosecution led by lawyer and national deputy Juan Grabois, who argued that the asset freezes imposed on Hayden Davis, Mauricio Novelli and Manuel Terrones Godoy were set too low.
Martínez de Giorgi, who is overseeing the case (which was initially investigated by Judge María Servini), had set embargoes at just under 37 million pesos for Davis, Novelli and Terrones Godoy.
In the days prior to the launch of $Libra, Terrones Godoy opened two safety deposit boxes at the Martínez branch of Banco Galicia. On the first business day after February 14, he, along with his mother and sister, reportedly removed a backpack and a bag filled with contents, according to Página/12, which said it had accessed security camera footage.
The appellate judges instructed Martínez de Giorgi to “set a prudent financial guarantee in line with that reality.”
“To that end, in each case a sum must be assessed which, according to the scale and impact of the acts, the amount of damage and the degree of participation, proves necessary,” the magistrates stated.
Lawyers Nicolás Rechanik and Yamil Castro Bianchi, part of Grabois’ legal team and representing investors who bought the token and lost assets, have warned the courts about digital fund movements beyond the scope of the investigation.
Last year, days before the first asset freeze was imposed, authorities detected that Novelli and Terrones Godoy made had transfers worth up to US$500,000 in cryptocurrency.
Argentine courts must also decide whether to accept two Belarusian citizens – Krasutskaya Sviatlana Vitalievna and Lapchenko Vladislav Andreevich – as plaintiffs. They claim to have lost around US$2 million trading $LIBRA A separate case concerning the alleged fraud is proceeding before US Judge Jennifer Rochon in the Southern District of New York.
“The plausibility of the claim and the risk of delay invoked, if not pursued simultaneously with the investigation, will ultimately undermine the nature of the precautionary measures ordered at this preliminary stage,” Bruglia and Bertuzzi wrote.
Following the February 14, 2025 tweet promoting $LIBRA, the token’s price surged from US$0.01 to US$5 within hours before crashing, leaving thousands of investors facing losses. Others, however, secured multimillion-dollar gains.
Those named in the complaint include Milei; his sister and presidential chief-of-staff, Karina Milei; businessman Julian Peh (real name Peh Chyi Haur); as well as Davis, Terrones Godoy, Sergio Morales Morales – a former official at the Comisión Nacional de Valores who was removed from his post after the scandal – Novelli and members of his family.
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