Argentina Assigns Milei $LIBRA Complaint to Federal Judge

Argentina’s federal judiciary assigned the first criminal complaint arising from President Javier Milei’s promotion of the $LIBRA crypto token to Judge María Servini on February 17, 2025. The assignment placed a fast-moving token collapse involving a sitting head of state into Federal Court No. 1 in Buenos Aires.

The step was procedural, not a finding that Milei or anyone connected with $LIBRA had committed a crime. It mattered because allegations that began with a social-media endorsement and a volatile token had become a formal judicial matter, alongside a separate review announced by Argentina’s executive branch.

From presidential post to token collapse

Milei posted about $LIBRA on his personal X account on February 14, 2025, presenting the project as a way to support Argentine small businesses and startups. He removed the post after the token’s rapid rise reversed. On February 15, the Office of the President said Milei had not participated in developing the cryptocurrency and had deleted the message to avoid further speculation and publicity.

That official statement also acknowledged earlier meetings. It said Milei met KIP Protocol representatives on October 19, 2024, and Hayden Mark Davis on January 30, 2025. The presidency described Davis as a proposed technology-infrastructure provider and said he had no continuing relationship with the government. Those were the executive’s contemporaneous representations, not independent judicial findings.

Contemporaneous Associated Press and Reuters reports described $LIBRA—the specific token promoted by Milei—as surging after the post and collapsing within hours. This reconstruction does not state an exact token price, market capitalization, percentage decline or investor-loss total. Trading was fragmented across decentralized venues, and the surviving reports do not provide a single venue-normalized price series, supply convention or common start-and-end timestamp suitable for a reproducible calculation.

What the court assignment meant

Argentine lawyers filed fraud complaints on February 16, 2025. On February 17, the first complaint was allocated by lottery to Servini, the judge heading Federal Court No. 1. Local contemporaneous reporting said the filing came from national deputy Claudio Lozano and the Observatory for the Right to the City.

The complaints alleged criminal conduct connected to Milei’s promotion of the token. At that stage, those claims remained accusations by complainants. The assignment did not establish the token’s creators, determine who controlled trading wallets, calculate losses or decide whether Milei’s conduct satisfied any criminal offense.

That distinction is central to the event-day record. A judge receiving a complaint is not equivalent to a conviction, an indictment or even a final determination of investigative scope. On February 17, the verified development was that the matter had entered an identifiable federal court and judge’s docket for examination.

Why February 17 mattered for crypto

The episode exposed how political authority could become a market input for a thinly established token. A presidential endorsement could rapidly concentrate attention and liquidity, while deletion of the endorsement could deepen uncertainty about sponsorship, due diligence and accountability. Those dynamics were institutionally significant even without asserting that the post alone caused every trade or loss.

It also blurred categories often kept separate in public debate: a private token launch, a government economic-development narrative, influencer-style promotion and public-official ethics. The presidency’s February 15 statement said the Anti-Corruption Office would examine whether any national-government member, including Milei, acted improperly, and promised an investigative task unit focused on crypto assets, finance and money laundering.

For market participants, the court assignment offered no recovery mechanism and no verified accounting of gains or losses. For institutions, however, it marked the point at which the $LIBRA controversy became more than a reputational dispute: Argentina’s judiciary had a named judge responsible for the first complaint.

Later context

On February 19, 2025, Argentina’s executive signed Decree 114/2025, and the measure was published on February 20. The decree formally instructed the Anti-Corruption Office to investigate possible irregularities involving $LIBRA and created an investigative task unit in the Justice Ministry. That later action confirms a formal government response, but it was not part of the completed record on February 17.