Tunisia’s finance minister Ali Kooli said there is a need to amend the country’s legislation to ‘decriminalise’ the holding of the first cryptocurrency.
The Minister of Economy in Tunisia says I will change the law, we cannot put a Tunisian young man in prison for buying Bitcoinpic.twitter.com/hdsxpiYc5c
— 🇸🇦#BITCOIN احمد (@ahmdnet2) June 12, 2021
According to him, the trigger was reports of the arrest of a 17-year-old for using digital assets.
In May, local media reported that Tunisian authorities allegedly accused a young man of money laundering. The incident provoked outrage in the cryptocurrency community — some participants expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of regulatory clarity in the industry.
In 2018 the cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb disabled user accounts from Tunisia and 10 other countries to comply with anti-money-laundering laws.
Two years later LocalBitcoins imposed similar restrictions on residents of the African country. The measures were explained by EU requirements.
Earlier attempts to regulate the industry were undertaken by Nigeria. In September, authorities classified cryptocurrencies as securities, and in February 2021 ordered commercial financial institutions to close the accounts of companies working with cryptocurrencies.
In late March the central bank clarified that did not prohibit local residents from buying and selling Bitcoin.