Argentina’s president faces crypto fraud allegations, impeachment calls
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
From the BBC World Service: Opposition politicians in Argentina want to impeach President Javier Milei after a short-lived promotion of an obscure cryptocurrency caused investors to lose thousands of dollars. We’ll hear more. Plus, Russia and the U.S. are meeting in Saudi Arabia for their first direct talks designed to end the war in Ukraine. And, we’ll learn how a lack of investment in Germany’s infrastructure has affected one town in East Germany.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Argentina's president accused of crypto scumming faces impeachment calls live from the UK. This is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Koreshi, standing in for Leanna Burn. Hi there. Opposition politicians in Argentina want to impeach President Javier Millet, This after his short-lived promotion of an obscure cryptocurrency |
| 0:22.9 | caused investors to lose thousands of dollars. |
| 0:26.3 | The BBC's Nick Marsh is following the story. |
| 0:28.6 | Yes, Nick, hi. |
| 0:29.5 | How's all this come about? |
| 0:30.7 | Well, he's a big social media user, the Argentinian president, |
| 0:34.8 | and on Friday he posted a link on X about LibraCoin. It's not a well-known |
| 0:41.5 | cryptocurrency, but this post caused the price to shoot up. But within a few hours, he deleted it, |
| 0:50.6 | and then the price subsequently shot down. And a lot of investors in the process lost a significant |
| 0:57.3 | amount of money. So Javier Malay is now in a very difficult position whereby his political opponents |
| 1:04.0 | are talking about him being a fraudster and lawyers have already filed complaints against him in Argentina's criminal court. |
| 1:13.4 | How critical a moment is this for the presidency? Well, the fact that his political opponents are |
| 1:19.8 | already talking about impeaching him shows that he is in a tight spot. Havier-M-Le has denied anything amounting to a scam. He basically said he'd |
| 1:32.3 | heard about this coin, which might be able to stimulate the growth of the Argentine economy, |
| 1:37.9 | you know, help out small businesses and entrepreneurs. So he decided to promote it on his |
| 1:43.1 | ex-feed. Then he says that when he learned |
| 1:45.5 | more, he deleted the post and decided to stop promoting it. And he says that he's got no connection |
| 1:50.7 | at all with the private company with the project behind Libra Coin, even though his office does |
| 1:58.1 | admit that he actually did meet with representatives of the company |
| 2:01.6 | quite recently. And one of those representatives even blamed Haviam Leigh for the |
| 2:08.7 | cryptocurrencies collapse, you know, this sort of posting and then quick withdrawal of his |
| 2:14.5 | support. So he's facing a lot of pressure now. A judge has been appointed to look |
... |
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