Mt. Gox attorneys say in a court filing that Mark Karpeles is unwilling to travel to the US to address questions regarding the exchange’s closure.
Bitcoin is a digital currency that is traded on a peer-to-peer network independent of any central control. In total the value of existing bitcoins is nearly $7 billion.
Once the world’s top bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox found missing a big amount of its customers bitcoins and was accused of fraud in the beginning of this month.
Now U.S. is ordering Mt. Gox CEO to come on April 17th to Dallas and to give more details on why Mt. Gox shut down and how hundreds of thousands of customer bitcoins were lost.
Mark Karpeles, the founder of Mt. Gox, said he would not travel to the United States to attend Mt. Gox bankruptcy hearing and answer questions regarding the Japanese bitcoin exchange’s US bancruptcy case, Mt. Gox lawyers told to a federal judge in a court filing on Monday.
Even though, Mark Karpeles received an order to appear in a US Bankrupsy Court in Dallas on Thurday Mt. Gox attorneys said that the CEO of Mt. Gox “won’t attend bankruptcy hearing and also not willing to travel to US.”
In the court filing, Mt. Gox lawyers cited a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the network has closely analyzed information about virtual currency such as Bitcoin.
That subpoena, which requires Karpeles to appear in Washington, DC, on Friday, “did not specify topics for discussion,” Mt Gox lawyers wrote in the filing.
“Mr. Karpeles is now in the process of obtaining counsel to represent him with respect to the FinCEN Subpoena,” the filing said. “Until such time as counsel is retained and has an opportunity to ‘get up to speed’ and advise Mr. Karpeles, he is not willing to travel to the U.S.”
Moreover, the court papers said that the Japanese court had been informed about the order to be in the US on Friday and hearing in Japanese court was scheduled on Tuesday in Japan.
Mt. Gox’s lawyers also said there was no guarantee that Karpeles would attend a May 5 bancrupsy deposition in the case, even though they asked to delay the meeting till this day.
In February, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan, as it lost billions of dollars due to hacking into its security system. Karpeles says that the bitcoins were stolen by the hackers, but cybercriminals who hijacked Karpeles’ Reddit account and blog last month claims the exchange kept bitcoins that were considered stolen.
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