Nexo co-founder Antoni Trenchev called charges by Bulgarian police including money laundering and tax evasion 'ludicrous' after offices raided.
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Nexo's co-founder has said Bulgarian allegations that the company was involved in money laundering and the funding of terrorism are "ludicrous."
While not identified by name, Antoni Trenchev said that while he had not been contacted by officials, he assumed he was one of the four people Bulgarian authorities said were charged with violating anti-money laundering and terrorism financing regulations on Jan. 13.
One of the few crypto lenders that escaped the bankruptcies of Three Arrows Capital and FTX essentially unscathed, Nexo's offices in Bulgaria's capital were raided by some 300 officers in January. Other charges include tax violations, the establishment of an organized crime group, and unlicensed banking.
Antoni Trenchev said the charges are "slowly unfolding for what they are" and that prosecutors were "grasping for straws to make a case stick" in a Bloomberg interview.
At the time of the raids, Nexo issued a statement on Twitter saying it has "turned down a lot of business because Nexo never makes compromises with regard to our very stringent anti-money-laundering and Know Your Customer policies."
Arguing that the charges "shows the rampant lack of rule of law in the country," Trenchev said this is what Bulgarian prosecutors do:
"They give out press conferences. They make a bunch of accusations and they have no followthrough after that. And it takes years to exonerate your name because there is no procedure to make them actually file anything in court so that you can start."
At the time of the announcement, authorities said two of the four had been detained and two were being sought.
Trenchev, a former Bulgarian National Assembly member, founded Nexo with Kosta Kantchev, Georgi Shulev and Kalin Metodiev in 2018.
Walking Away
While essentially undamaged by the swath of crypto lender bankruptcies, Nexo ran into trouble in the U.S.
In December, Nexo cut off services in eight states and said it planned to withdraw from the U.S. market entirely.
In the wake of the FTX collapse, Nexo said it found that U.S. regulators were no longer willing to work with it, and were "taking positions that are inconsistent with one another, creating an impossible environment to operate." It added:
"More than 18 months of good-faith dialogue with U.S. state and federal regulators [came] to a dead end."
