The Polish police have arrested the President of Crypto Capital, Ivan Manuel Molina Lee, accused by a local prosecutor’s office of money laundering in Poland, as well as being a member of an international drug trafficking cartel.
This is reported by wPolityce.pl, according to which the suspect was arrested in Greece, and then taken to Warsaw by a military plane.
Molina Lee is the subject of a European arrest warrant issued by the Wroclaw local prosecutor’s office. He is also the president of the company registered in Michałowice.
Crypto Capital, involved in the recent problems of Bitfinex, holds Bitfinex’s deposit accounts with Bank Spółdzielczy, in Skierniewice, and the prosecutor’s office has also seized almost 1.5 billion Polish zlotys (almost 400 million dollars) from the bank in Skierniewice.
The accusation is that he has laundered money from Colombian drug cartels.
In particular, these would be a series of practices undertaken by members of an international organised criminal group that operated in Poland from December 2016 to February 2018.
Crypto Capital had previously gotten into trouble with justice, to the point that some of its funds were blocked, creating problems for the Bitfinex crypto exchange.
The exchange owned 850 million dollars, which were supposedly blocked and then taken out of Bitfinex’s assets, creating a real hole.
The cause that led to this block would be the one related to the former co-owner of the NFL team of Minnesota Vikings, Reginald “Reggie” Fowler, and the Israeli Ravid Yosef, accused by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) of several bank frauds.
It remains to be seen now if the arrest of Molina Lee can in some way unlock Bitfinex’s 850 million dollars that are still frozen, and thus not usable by the exchange.
