Argentine judge dismisses LIBRA criminal case against Milei

An Argentine federal judge threw out the criminal case against President Javier Milei over the LIBRA memecoin on Friday, October 23, 2026, ruling that his promotion of a token that later lost more than $250 million did not add up to fraud.

Judge Marcelo Martinez de Giorgi dismissed the case at the request of prosecutor Eduardo Taiano, according to CoinDesk and a Reuters report datelined Buenos Aires. The ruling also cleared the president's sister, Karina Milei, the secretary general of the presidency, and nine other people, among them the US businessman Hayden Davis, who had called himself a launch adviser for the coin.

What the judge ruled

Martinez de Giorgi found no evidence of fraud. He wrote that Milei's standing as president could have given the launch "greater impact," but that his social media post and the coin's collapse "do not, in themselves, amount to a fraudulent scheme," Reuters reported. He also said there was no proof that Karina Milei sought or took money in exchange for access to her brother, and no proof that LIBRA's proceeds reached public officials.

None of the eleven people had been formally questioned before the case was dropped, according to CoinDesk. The others named in the file included the lobbyist Mauricio Novelli and Julian Peh, chief executive of KIP Protocol, a firm linked to the launch.

That reasoning matters. A dismissal at this stage says prosecutors could not build a fraud case, not that nothing went wrong. The judge ruled on one question, criminal fraud. Nothing more.

Where the money went

LIBRA launched on the Solana network on February 17, 2025. The token came from a venture called the Viva La Libertad Project, with Davis's firm Kelsier Ventures and KIP Protocol among the parties behind the launch, according to Decrypt. It spiked to a price near $0.75 and a market value of about $4.5 billion within hours, then fell close to 90% the same day. Milei had shared the project's website and contract address in a post that day, then deleted it the next morning and said he had not known the details.

Blockchain researchers said eight digital wallets linked to the coin's creator pulled out about $99 million in crypto, Reuters reported. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor put a number on how many people lost money. Milei said at the time of the crash that he had acted "in good faith" and stopped promoting the project once he learned more. The scale is easy to picture. A token worth about $4.5 billion in the morning was worth a fraction of that by night.

Why the case is not closed

Excluded investors could still pull the case back open. A group removed as plaintiffs in July, a step an appeals court upheld in September, is now challenging that removal before Argentina's Federal Criminal Cassation Court, CoinDesk reported. If the court reinstates them, they could appeal Friday's dismissal. Taiano, who asked for the case to be dropped, is not expected to appeal.

The ruling lands in a charged political setting. Milei's office welcomed it in a statement, saying the judge acted because the conduct under review was not a crime, and casting the probe, which opened before Argentina's 2025 midterm elections, as an effort to damage the president in an election year, CoinDesk reported. Legal pressure on crypto token promoters has run in more than one direction this year, from dismissals like this one to arrests abroad, as BTC Newz reported when Turkey detained Hex founder Richard Heart.

What to watch

Two things decide whether this is truly over. First, whether the Cassation Court puts the excluded investors back in the file. Second, whether any of them then appeals. Nothing here is final. The fight is not over. Civil claims and the political dispute over LIBRA sit on a separate track, and neither ended on Friday. BTC Newz follows these cases on its regulation and policy page.