An investor in the $LIBRA cryptocurrency token on Monday became the first to appeal the dismissal of the criminal case against President Milei and his sister Karina, asking that the ruling be reversed and the investigation continue.
The investor, Juan Patricio Marchetto, filed a 40-page appeal against the October 23 ruling by federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi, who dismissed the case against Milei, Karina Milei, the presidency’s secretary general, and nine other suspects at the request of prosecutor Eduardo Taiano. His lawyers include Juan Grabois, a social movement leader.
His main argument is that the judge confused a lack of sufficient proof with a finding that no crime occurred. He says Taiano also asked to close the case while tests the prosecutor had ordered were unfinished, including a wider analysis of the phones of two men the case file says received money from US businessman Hayden Davis, one of the suspects. None of the 11 suspects was called to give a statement as a suspect. “A dismissal cannot become the way to declare irrelevant what the investigation itself had not finished investigating,” Marchetto wrote.
Taiano’s written opinion, on which the judge based the ruling, found no factual basis to continue. On fraud, he wrote that the project existed, the token was launched and its trading ran in public on the blockchain, and that “the economic merits of the project, its later success or even the speculative sense of buying the token can be debated, but none of that turns the facts into a fraud.” He also cited a finding by the Anti-Corruption Office, a government agency, that Milei did not break the public ethics law.
Taiano wrote that analyses by prosecution and federal police investigators could not link those two men to the alleged maneuvers. The judge wrote that a token’s rise and fall after a public figure promotes it does not by itself show a fraudulent plan.
The filing also points to phone records that, it says, show four calls between Milei and Mauricio Novelli, a lobbyist among the suspects, in the minutes before the president’s post about $LIBRA, and to a reconstruction of transactions in which, it says, digital wallets made 87 transactions worth about US$13.5 million seconds before the post.
The appeal has a complication. Martínez de Giorgi removed Marchetto and other investors as private accusers, parties who can press a case alongside the prosecutor, on July 3, leaving Taiano as the only party pushing the investigation, and a federal appeals court upheld that on September 4. Marchetto has asked the Federal Chamber of Cassation, a higher criminal court, to reverse his removal. He argues that until it rules he can still appeal as a would-be accuser, so that a later reinstatement does not come too late.
A second group of removed investors, represented by lawyer Nicolás Oszust, is preparing a similar challenge, and other investors are expected to file appeals this week.