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Argentine judge dismisses LIBRA criminal case against Milei and 10 others

Judge Martinez de Giorgi closes the LIBRA probe at prosecutor Taiano's request, ruling the memecoin promotion did not meet the bar for criminally relevant deception.

by 4 min read
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Argentine federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi dismissed the criminal probe into President Javier Milei and ten co-defendants over the $LIBRA memecoin on Friday, October 23, 2026, closing the file at prosecutor Eduardo Taiano's request. The judge's 60-page ruling, reported by The Block and Infobae, found no "criminally relevant deception" in Milei's social-media promotion of the token or in the surrounding team activity. None of the 11 defendants had been called to give a formal statement as a suspect.

Who was cleared

The sobreseimiento covers 11 people:

  • Javier Milei, President of Argentina.
  • Karina Milei, his sister, Secretary General of the Presidency.
  • Hayden Davis, the American who described himself as LIBRA's "launch adviser."
  • Mauricio Novelli, Argentine crypto lobbyist. The dismissal came in response to a motion from his defence team.
  • Julian Peh, chief executive of KIP Protocol.
  • Six additional defendants not named in the coverage, including the crypto operators Manuel Terrones Godoy and Sergio Daniel Morales, previously identified in Taiano's complaint.

The judge's reasoning

Taiano argued that memecoins operate in a market "characterised by high volatility and a significant speculative component," and that promoting such a token through social media did not, on its own, show investors had been "induced to trade through false statements." Martínez de Giorgi adopted that position.

Specific findings:

  • Milei's office "could have conferred particular repercussion and visibility" on the token, but promoter notoriety and launch publicity "do not, in themselves, amount to a fraudulent scheme."
  • On a note from Novelli's phone describing three payments totalling $5 million, forensic analysis confirmed the note existed in Apple Notes but could not show it had been sent to Davis or anyone else.
  • Deleted chats with a contact saved as "Karina Milei RRPP" were recovered, as were records of Milei-Novelli calls, but investigators could not reconstruct the content.
  • Karina Milei's only established link to Davis was a presidency record of her authorising his entry to the Casa Rosada on July 16, 2024 — "considered in isolation," per the ruling, that "does not demonstrate the existence of an illicit agreement."

The case in numbers

- LIBRA promo post: Milei on X, evening of Feb. 14, 2025
- Peak market cap: ~$4.5 billion
- Price crash: ~95% within hours of Milei deleting the post
- Reported investor losses: ~$251 million (Infobae)
- Team-linked wallets cashed out: ~$107 million across
  8 addresses (on-chain analysts)
- Private plaintiffs removed: 5 investors, July 2026
- Appeals-court ruling on the removal: upheld Sept. 4, 2026
  (judges Mariano Llorens and Pablo Bertuzzi)
- Dismissed defendants: 11 (Milei + 10)
- Ruling length: 60 pages

What is still open

The criminal track is closed on fraud charges, but two threads survive:

  1. The queja before the Federal Criminal Cassation Court. The five private plaintiffs removed in July — classified by appeals judges as "LIBRA buyers who voluntarily assumed the risks inherent in that type of purchase" — have asked Cassation to reinstate them. A reversal there would reopen appellate rights on the dismissal itself.
  2. The Congressional record. A November 2025 report from Congress's LIBRA commission, chaired by opposition deputy Maximiliano Ferraro, concluded that Milei had provided "essential collaboration" to the project. The judge's ruling does not address that finding. Ferraro called the dismissal "a clear planned judicial operation of cover-up and impunity."

Milei's own reaction, posted to X: "Justice has once again put things in their place, exposing the TREMENDOUS political and media operation..."

The judge-appointment subplot

On July 15, 2026 — twelve days after the private plaintiffs were removed — Milei and Justice Minister Juan Bautista Mahiques signed a decree naming the judge's wife, Ana María Cristina Juan, to a federal court. Opposition legislator Sabrina Selva raised the appointment at the time; the ruling does not address it, and Taiano's prosecutorial independence remains the operative question for any Cassation review.

Pattern

LIBRA sits in a growing pattern of memecoin-fraud actions that collapse at the criminal-liability threshold even where civil damage is undisputed. The combination of (a) speculative-asset doctrine, (b) absence of a defined promoter-liability regime for insider token launches, and (c) difficulty tying off-chain intent to on-chain cash-outs leaves prosecutors with a thin case even when the on-chain record is clean. The parallel US treatment of similar schemes — SEC civil actions rather than DOJ criminal charges — has produced the same pattern.

For prior coverage of the LIBRA file on this site, see the French-language write-up of the sobreseimiento published this morning (LIBRA : la justice fédérale argentine prononce un non-lieu pour Milei) and the memecoin-flow coverage of similar incidents.

Sources:

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