Simple employee or key manager? French justice released at the end of September Mykhailo L., a 28-year-old Ukrainian whom it considers to be its main suspect in an investigation into the Bitzlato cryptocurrency exchange platform which allegedly laundered criminal assets until the beginning of 2023.
According to a source close to the case, the Paris Court of Appeal placed this man under judicial supervision on September 24.
Like two other men in Spain, one in Portugal, one in Cyprus and especially in the United States, the Russian founder and main shareholder of Bitzlato, Anatoli Legkodimov, Mykhailo L. was arrested in January 2023 as part of a dragnet. jointly announced by Paris and Washington, during which 20 million euros of criminal assets were seized.
Bitzlato was then presented by the Paris prosecutor’s office as a platform allowing “the rapid conversion of cryptoassets (…) into rubles” in order to “launder funds obtained as part of illegal activities (scams, sales on the financial markets). darknet and ransomware…)”.
According to elements of the investigation obtained by AFP, the investigation into this platform founded in 2017 by four Russian shareholders, including Legkodimov, and hosted on French servers, began with police intelligence.
Investigators quickly suspected that Bitzlato was helping to exchange cryptocurrencies for rubles on a global scale “within minutes” and “anonymously”.
According to the prosecution, the platform did indeed put in place a system to verify the identity of its customers and the origin of their assets, but far too late (in spring 2022) and in an incomplete manner.
In a January 2023 report, Chainalysis, a specialist in the study of cryptocurrency transactions, estimated that 26% of Bitzlato’s financial flow since 2019 was linked to cryptoassets directly linked to illicit activities, which represents 650 million dollars.
This analysis is contested by another source close to the file consulted by AFP.
American justice indicated that Bitzlato carried out the majority of its transactions with “Hydra Market”, the late queen platform for selling the “darknet” (the dark part of the web not referenced by search engines) which was judicially closed.
Bitzlato is thus associated with drug trafficking, the financing of the Russian invasion in Ukraine or, on the French side, fraud in the partial activity compensation system linked to the Covid-19 epidemic.
Were its leaders aware of this? Yes, according to some of the 500,000 messages found in “Mattermost”, the internal messaging system.
Anatoli Legkodimov and the other main partner, both Russians and who are to this day escaping French justice, are said to have mentioned in 2018-2019 their knowledge of the doubtful origin of part of the company’s turnover.
They even mentioned the possibility of taking 3% commission on these suspicious transactions, compared to 0.5% usually on others.
What about Mykhailo L.? Upon his arrival in France from Spain in March 2023, he initially minimized his responsibility and contested any infringement, limiting his authority to the marketing sector only.
– “Unavoidable” –
Other people interviewed, on the contrary, presented him as “CEO”, or CEO in French, i.e. an “essential element” of the Bitzlato system, with “decision-making power” and knowledge of control failures.
Anatoli Legkodimov, on parole since July 2024 after 18 months of detention and a guilty plea to money laundering in New York, thus rejected in February before the French investigating magistrates a large part of Bitzlato’s errors in terms of user control on Mykhailo L.
To date, at least five people are indicted in France.
Lawyer for Mykhailo L. contacted by the AFP, Me Beryl Brown expressed her “relief” after this release.
“These are files where the question of the responsibility of these internet platform employees (cryptocurrency or even messaging) in the use made of them by organized crime will always arise. For my part, I consider that it is not There is no proof of their involvement,” she added.
Lawyer for another defendant, Mr. Frédéric Belot, worries: “Won’t the French justice system come across lampoons who know nothing about it, while Mr. Legkodimov has been released in the United States? ?”
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