The founder of Zotobi Management Limited, Igor Chuprin, demanded that Telegram return investments in the Telegram Open Network (TON) project in full. However, the court rejected the suit, Forbes reports.
Chuprin became a TON investor in 2018. He invested $1 million in the project; whether these were solely his own funds is unknown.
In April 2020, Pavel Durov announced that TON would not be launched. He offered investors either to receive 72% of the funds immediately, or to keep the funds as a loan and receive 110% by 30 April 2021.
Soon after this, in May 2020, Chuprin filed a lawsuit in an attempt to recover all invested money — he did not want to treat the funds as a loan, but, in addition to 72%, planned to obtain the remaining $280 000.
According to him, he made the investment decision in a hurry and did not obtain risk documents.
On February 6, the London Court of International Arbitration dismissed Chuprin’s claim against Telegram Group and TON Issuer. In addition, it ordered him to cover Telegram’s legal costs of $700,000 and the court’s own costs of nearly £56,000.
In court, it was found that Chuprin either had familiarised himself with the documents, since they circulated online and were discussed in the blockchain community, or “understood all the risks, and it did not bother him”.
The token-purchase agreement signed by the founder of Zotobi Management Limited states that he had read the risks.
The plaintiff’s representative insisted that Telegram could still launch TON outside the US jurisdiction and distribute tokens to investors from other countries. However, at the trial Pavel Durov said that such a launch the team considered “very dangerous”.
The court noted that Zotobi would have been better off accepting Telegram’s alternative offer of a loan.
As previously reported, in two rounds of a closed ICO in February and March 2018 TON raised $1.7 billion from 175 investors in the US and beyond.
The TON project never launched due to a clash with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
After this, some investors filed a lawsuit against TON-affiliated companies.
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