Court Returns 1.8-Billion-Ruble Claim Against Alfa-Bank and BTC-e-Linked Company

On 4 February, the Moscow Arbitration Court returned to the owner of the British company Mayzus Financial Services (MFS) Sergey Maizus the claim for the recovery of 1.8 billion rubles from Alfa-Bank and XP Solutions Limited.

In a ruling, the court stated that the case falls outside its jurisdiction, as it is not a corporate dispute, does not have an economic or property-based character of the claim, and is not connected with the plaintiff’s entrepreneurial activity.

Representatives of the court noted that in support of the claims Sergey Maizus referred to losses arising from what he considered an unlawful money transfer. At the same time, the Arbitration Court had previously considered a claim for the recovery of funds in Maizus’s favour in enforcement of a Cypriot court’s decision on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Nevertheless, in the framework of the present case, the subject of assessment is the emergence of delictual obligations on the part of the defendants toward the plaintiff,

The plaintiff may appeal the decision within a month.

As reported, Maizus claims that the BTC-e operator, Canton Business Corporation, transferred €45.3 million and $30.9 million to XP Solutions Limited accounts at Alfa-Bank from January 1, 2016 to July 2017. The transactions were conducted through the MoneyPolo payment system, one of MFS’s brands.

The owner of Canton Business Corporation is a Russian national, Alexander Vinnik, who was to five years in prison in France for laundering funds through BTC-e.

According to Maizus, in June 2020 XP Solutions Limited withdrew from Alfa-Bank more than $90 million belonging to Canton Business Corporation to accounts in New Zealand. As a result, from more than 1.86 billion rubles, the plaintiff was able to recover only 58.8 million rubles from the BTC-e operator.

Follow ForkLog’s Bitcoin news on our Telegram — cryptocurrency news, prices and analytics.