A Greek court has backed a US request to extradite a Russian businessman accused of laundering billions of dollars in the digital currency bitcoin.
Alexander Vinnik, who was arrested in July while on holiday in Greece, denied charges that he used BTC-e, a digital currency exchange that he operated, to facilitate criminal activities.
According to a US indictment, these included computer hacking, fraud, identity theft and drug trafficking, which earned BTC-e more than €4bn during its operations.
Mr Vinnik appealed Wednesday’s ruling to Greece’s supreme court, which will hear the case later this month.
Alexandros Lykourezos, his lawyer, said that US authorities had provided insufficient evidence to back the extradition request.
Russia has also asked for Mr Vinnik to be extradited to face charges of fraud, but no date has been set for the hearing. He would be willing to return to Moscow without contesting the extradition case, Mr Lykourezos said.
Mr Vinnik denies all the charges against him, claiming he was a technical consultant to BTC-e, not its operator.
According to the indictment, Mr Vinnik and others developed a customer base for BTC-e that was “heavily reliant on criminals, including by not requiring users to validate their identity, obscuring and anonymising transactions and source of funds and by lacking any anti-money laundering processes.”
The indictment also alleges Mr Vinnik was involved in the hacking of Mt Gox, a Japan-based bitcoin exchange that collapsed in 2014, and the laundering of its missing funds through BTC-e and Tradehill, another bitcoin exchange he operated, based in San Francisco. Mr Vinnik also denies these allegations.
The Greek justice minister has the final say in the case of conflicted court rulings.