Dmitry ‘Moryachka’ Khavchenko was stripped of victim status in the case concerning the embezzlement of assets of the WEX cryptocurrency exchange. In addition, he is no longer listed as the owner of the trading platform, journalist Irek Murtazin reported в своем Telegram-канале.
September 6 in the Meshchansky Court of Moscow, another hearing in the case against BTC-e (WEX) system administrator Aleksei Biluchenko (Ivanov) took place. The case was transferred to the capital from Novosibirsk.
Before the proceedings began, the previously designated victim Khavchenko learned that instead of him the status had been given to a certain ‘straw man with an Armenian passport’, who had not previously participated in the proceedings.
From the attached videos, it appears that he is now being called the owner of the exchange.
CEO Sergey Mendeleev in his Telegram channel подтвердил, that the official operator of WEX — the Singaporean company World Exchange Services — indeed changed owner and CEO, as evidenced by registry extracts.
“[“Moryachka” is no longer a victim in the case — everything has been taken away. And this will place the case under a special regime of proceedings],” he added in a ForkLog comment.
According to Bits.media, Igor Pravdin became the sole shareholder and CEO of the company.
Khavchenko himself believes the documents could have been forged. His representative in Singapore intends to file a police report regarding the alleged seizure of the company.
“Both the current and former owners of WEX are almost certainly people related to Konstantin Malofeyev. Igor Pravdin is the full namesake of the CEO of LLC ‘Agrutur’, the beneficiary of which, according to the SPARK-Interfax database, is Malofeyev. Pravdin owned stakes in LLC ‘Kontur’ and LLC ‘Estate Tsargrad’, connected with the businessman,” said in a Bits.media commentary journalist and author of the book ‘Crypto’ Andrei Zakharov.
The hearing was adjourned until September 20.
‘Moryachka’ obtained ownership rights to WEX from the exchange’s former CEO Dmitry Vasilyev in July 2018. Later Khavchenko registered his daughter Darya as the official operator of the exchange — the Singapore-based World Exchange Services.
Recall, the ‘red admin’ Aleksei Biluchenko detained in March 2022 in the Moscow region. Law enforcement seized about 190 million rubles from him and placed him in Matrosskaya Tishina prison.
Biluchenko is charged with embezzlement of assets WEX.
According to investigators, in October 2018 the accused blocked access to accounts and wallets controlled by World Exchange Services Pte. Ltd., the company behind the platform. He also cut off access of the exchange owners and users to funds and crypto assets valued at 3.1 billion rubles.
During the pre-trial investigation Biluchenko fully complied with the conditions of the pretrial cooperation agreement and reimbursed the damage, providing information about his bank accounts.
In June 2023, the U.S. authorities accused the ‘red admin’ and BTC-e developer Alexander Werner with conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 BTC obtained from the Mt.Gox hack in 2011.