Nexo Sues Ex-Director Over Alleged $20M BTC Theft

Tuesday, Law360 reported that cryptocurrency lender Nexo has launched a lawsuit against its former CEO Georgi Shulev for refusing to uphold half of an agreement he made with the company before to his leave in 2019.

According to the article, the crypto lender filed a petition with the High Court of Justice in London, requesting the release of a frozen BitMEX account due to a disagreement with the previous director over the account’s assets.

Nexo said that Shulev violated the settlement agreement established in July by Andrew Henshaw, a federal court in London, by failing to surrender the BitMEX account formed using the defendant’s email address before leaving the company.

According to the article, the contested account contains up to nine cryptocurrencies, including 880 Bitcoins (BTC) with a current market value of $20,500,000. The crypto lender said that the account was used to trade futures contracts and that about 1451 BTC were paid to it in May 2019.

The issues began when Shulev quit the firm and blocked the email address associated with the account, claiming ownership of the funds and noting that the account had been set up as an individual account, not a corporate one.

Nexo, on the other hand, claimed that the account belonged to the company, arguing that it was a business trading account and that “Shulev has unlawfully acquired and continues to keep the nine assets of Nexo, their legal owner.”

The account was eventually disabled by BitMEX’s parent company, HDR Global, after the ex-repeated director’s efforts to alter the associated email address.

In response to the issue, HDR Global petitioned the London High Court to establish the account’s owner and demanded that Shulev and Nexo contact the company once the lender had secured the account.

The court decided that Shulev must “waive all rights to the company’s corporate trading account and transfer the crypto-assets” after giving up the account and receiving a $1 million settlement.

Shulev noted, however, that Nexo broke the agreement to send the first of five monthly payments to him, thus he cannot advise HDR Global that the situation has been resolved.

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