Argentian President Javier Milei is under the spotlight again owing to his links to the collapsed Libra token controversy from last year. In a fresh development, new evidence showing President Milei’s relation with the crypto project has made it to the headlines.
President Milei was reportedly in contact with one of the entrepreneurs — crypto lobbyist Mauricio Novelli — who was reportedly part of the Project Libra. The detail was brought to light by an investigation of the call logs that showed seven phone calls exchanged between the Argentinian leader and the crypto entrepreneur, New York Times reported on Monday.
The fetched call logs align with the timeline around which President Milei had posted support for the token on February 15 last year.
As of now, the President’s office in the Latin American country has neither confirmed nor denied NYT’s report.
A quick look back at the Libra scandal
In February last year, President Milei had endorsed the Libra memecoin through a now-deleted post on X, predicting that it could be crucial to boosting the country’s economy.
Following the post, the token price spoked by a whopping 3,000 percent shooting its market cap to $4.5 billion within hours of its launch. The project started to gather suspicions after its price spike started to dwindle asfter the sharp escalation without any specific reason.
Investors were quick to doubt if the token was a rug-pull project wherein its developers collected the invested funds and abandoned the token leaving investors high and dry.
A number of on-chain intelligence firms including Arkham Intelligence and LookOnChain jumped on investigating the token’s trajectory. It was soon discovered that the memecoin was created on the Solana wallet and around eight wallets were identified as holding 83 percent of the collected amount of over $4 billion.
The situation became more concerning after President Milei deleted his post promoting the token.
Following the 95 percent crash in Libra’s price, President Milei put out another statement withdrawing support for the token.
“I wasn’t aware of the details of the project, and after becoming aware of them, I decided not to keep promoting it (that’s why I deleted the tweet),” he had said at the time, claiming that all he was doing was supporting an “alleged private venture” with which he “obviously” had no connection.
Ongoing investigation
The Libra token’s short-lived market life started and ended over a year ago. A federal investigation in the case, however, is reportedly ongoing with President Milei being among people of interest in the case.
The contents of what the calls between President Milei and Novelli entailed remain undisclosed, the NYT report noted.
In November last year, a congressional committee had said that President Milei has been cooperating in the investigation and his actions are being evaluated.
More details on the ongoing probe remains unknown.