The president and head of Crypto Capital, the controversial Panama-based payments processor tied to Bitfinex and other major crypto exchanges named Ivan Manuel Molina Lee was arrested by Polish authorities. As the local news outlet wPolityce and their report published on October 24 outlined, Lee is suspected of money laundering and his involvement in an international drug cartel.
According to the article, Molina Lee was detained on the basis of the European Arrest Warrant issued by the prosecutor’s office in Wroclaw, Poland. His arrest is reportedly connected to the $350 million that were seized by the Polish Ministry of Justice before that.
Notably, the seized funds were held by Crypto SP. Z O.O. which is a local firm allegedly affiliated with Crypto Capital and Molina Lee’s arrest “was about money laundering [for] Colombian drug cartels through the cryptocurrency exchange,” the report said.
As the industry news outlet Decrypt also published, several other large crypto businesses and exchanges such as Binance, Kraken and BitMEX have also used the services of Crypto Capital in the past. The head of Crypto Capital is in the news now for being arrested.
The parent company of the major crypto exchange Bitfinex filed a discovery application to regain access to over $850 million in funds tied to Crypto Capital. This request is related to the purportedly inaccessible funds which were kept in bank accounts in Poland, Portugal, the UK and the United States.
The chief financial officer Giancarlo Devasini who explained that Ravid Yosef, a man involved with the exchange’s former payment processor Crypto Capital, provided him with various documents revealing that the firm transferred the Bitfinex client funds between different banks around Europe and the US.
Meanwhile, the previous cryptocurrency news showed that on April 25, the New York Attorney General’s office has alleged that Bitfinex lost $850 million and subsequently used funds from Tether – which is its affiliated stablecoin operator – to secretly cover this shortfall.
The Bitfinex shareholder Zhao Dong also said that the exchange has sealed $1 billion in both hard and soft commitments for its initial native exchange token offering. Now that the head of Crypto Capital is arrested, authorities are looking to investigate the case further.
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