Jul 10 (Japan Today) - The 32-year-old chief executive of defunct MtGox pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges relating to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins and cash from what was once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange.
French national Mark Karpeles filed the plea in response to charges of embezzlement and data manipulation at the Tokyo District Court, according to a pool report for foreign journalists.
MtGox once handled 80 percent of the world's bitcoin trades but filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after losing some 850,000 bitcoins - then worth around half a billion U.S. dollars and $28 million in cash from its Japanese bank accounts.
In its bankruptcy filing, Tokyo-based MtGox blamed hackers for the lost bitcoins, pointing to a software security flaw.
MtGox subsequently said it had found 200,000 of the missing bitcoins.
Prosecutors said Karpeles transferred around 340 million yen($3 million) from an account containing customer funds to an external account during September to December 2013, and increased the balance of the account via "improper operation" of Mt. Gox's trading system, the Nikkei business daily reported on Tuesday, citing Karpeles' indictment.
Karpeles' defence told a pre-trial consultation that the remittance was within the scope of the firm's revenue and not the embezzlement of customer funds, the Nikkei reported. They added the increased balance was part of the administrative process of exchanging cash and bitcoins and therefore not illegal, the Nikkei said.
Karpeles told the court he was an information technology engineer.
Source: ANNnewsCH
