Mark Karpeles refuses to travel until he secures counsel

Apr 15, 2014 12:46 GMT  ·  By

Mark Karpeles, the founder of Mt. Gox, will not be going to the United States to answer questions about the bankruptcy of his Bitcoin exchange.

The company’s lawyers made the announcement in front of a federal judge, despite previous encouragements for Karpeles to make the trip.

Reuters reports that Mt. Gox’s lawyers cited a subpoena from the US Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which had been looking into cryptocurrencies.

Karpeles is apparently in the process of obtaining counsel to represent him in the case related to this particular subpoena. Until counsel is retained and the lawyers have had the time to get up to speed with what’s happened and advise Karpeles, he refuses to travel to the United States.

The young CEO was supposed to appear before the court this Friday.

As mentioned, he had actually been advised to make the trip so he could perhaps obtain the same bankruptcy protection he had in Japan. This would have prevented people from suing Mt. Gox, especially since there’s already a class action in the works with users asking for their Bitcoins back.

Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy at the end of February, after several weeks of technical issues that were actually covering the fact that some 850,000 coins had somehow vanished, most of which belonged to the platform’s users.

A part of the coins was recovered a few weeks ago, but the biggest slice is still missing. A group of investors have actually offered to buy Mt. Gox for $1 for the business, which is more than enough, considering that they would be taking on a debt of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mt. Gox is accusing a transaction malleability embedded in the Bitcoin protocol for the missing coins, but researchers say that such a thing is impossible.

While it’s true that some coins could have been lost in this manner, the number would be closer to 60,000 than to 850,000, which means that the entire thing is bogus.

This particular report has put a new light on the statements coming from Mt. Gox employees, who went to Karpeles back in 2012 and confronted him about how the company was covering losses. They suspected then that the Bitcoin exchange was using customers’ money for such purposes, but Karpeles refused to give them a clear answer.