Argentine president facing impeachment threat over crypto scandal
Argentine President Javier Milei is facing threats of impeachment and legal action following his controversial promotion of a cryptocurrency that led to huge financial losses for investors in the Latin American country.
Opposition lawmakers at the Argentinean parliament threatened on Monday to initiate impeachment proceedings against Milei after he touted a sham cryptocurrency token which allowed a handful of con artists to dupe crypto owners out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day.
Milei took to X on Friday to endorse the $LIBRA coin, describing it as a tool to support small businesses and start-ups.
Milei's endorsement sent the coin’s value soaring, but when he deleted the post hours later, its price plummeted, wiping out investor funds.
Members of Argentina’s opposition have since announced plans to initiate impeachment proceedings, while lawyers filed fraud complaints in the country’s criminal court on Sunday.
Critics accused the Argentine president of orchestrating a “rug pull”—a scam in which cryptocurrency promoters inflate a coin’s value before abandoning it, leaving investors with heavy losses.
The controversy also fueled accusations of misconduct from the country’s opposition lawmakers, with Leandro Santoro, a member of the opposition coalition, taking to task Milei’s involvement and saying that his endorsement of the crypto was an abuse of public trust.
“This scandal, which embarrasses us on an international scale, requires us to launch an impeachment request against the president,” Santoro said, as cited by Reuters.
The presidential office defended Milei, stating that the post was removed to prevent “speculation,” and that the president had no direct involvement in the cryptocurrency’s creation.
The government’s Anti-Corruption Office has been tasked with investigating whether any wrongdoing took place, including on Milei’s part.
The country’s main opposition coalition has vowed to file an impeachment request, calling the situation an “unprecedented scandal.”
Milei was elected amidst a surge of anger over the country's economic decline in November 2023.
Apart from being a far-right populist leader who has been compared with US President Donald Trump, he also describes himself an “anarcho-capitalist libertarian.”
People got to know him through his slogan “There’s no money”, which he said after taking office and pledged to terminate the era of excessive spending by his predecessors.
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