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6 months ago
5
ARTICLE AD BOX
Another benchmark crypto investor has been arrested. If last week the CEO of Binance was sentenced to prison, now it is the former CEO of Bitcoin.com who was arrested for tax fraud. Roger Ver, who was born in San Jose and lives in Japan, was one of the first recognized crypto investors back in 2011.
His company, MemoryDealers, was one of the first to accept Bitcoin payments. Roger Ver is also one of the five founders of the Bitcoin Foundation and is currently one of the main proponents of Bitcoin Cash. All these movements led to him being popularly referred to as “Bitcoin Jesus.”
But now he has been arrested in Spain and charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with evading more than 45 million euros in taxes, Reuters reports.
The case goes back a long way. In 2014, the investor renounced his U.S. citizenship, which already made him suspicious. According to Bryan Skarlatos, his lawyer, the investor intends to comply with all legal obligations, but these statements by his lawyer did not stop him from allowing himself to be arrested while he was in Spain.
Roger Ver’s net worth was estimated to be about 131,000 BTC in 2014, which was worth about $114 million at the time. An amount that would currently be more than 60 times higher.
Roger Ver’s tax fraud stems from the sale of MemoryDealers.com and Agilestar.com, two companies that owned about 70,000 bitcoins in 2017 and were sold for about $240 million. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the investor did not pay the fees for the sale of these two companies. The fees were estimated to be about $48 million between 2014 and 2017.
The investor is in custody and is currently awaiting trial. According to Reuters, the United States plans to request extradition to Spain so that Roger Ver can be tried on U.S. soil, where he would have had to pay taxes.
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