Consob issued a resolution suspending the public offering of AirBit Club in Italy.
The National Commission for Companies and the Stock Exchange (Consob) is the Italian independent supervisory body for the protection of investors with the power to intervene to block financial offers to the public deemed not to be compliant.
In this case, the suspension concerns the websites airbitclub.com and bitbackoffice.com, as content available also in Italian language has been detected, so that the two sites are currently not accessible from Italy.
The problem stems from the fact that, also through these sites, AirBit Club offered the potential investor the possibility to subscribe to membership that would give the right to receive up to 50% of any profits generated.
Moreover, the transaction is presented as a de facto investment opportunity offering real financial products within the meaning of Article 1, paragraph 1, letter u) of the Consolidated Law on Financial Intermediation (Tuf).
This means that the Italian rules concerning public offers of financial products must be applied, including the need to obtain Consob’s approval for the mandatory prospectus.
AirBit Club has never obtained this approval, and indeed has never even requested it, since the prospectus was never submitted to Consob.
For this violation, the agency has suspended as a precautionary measure, for a period of 90 days, the Italian public offering of AirBit Club and the websites airbitclub.com and bitbackoffice.com.
In the resolution, Consob also writes that Airbit Club proposes itself as “the largest cryptoeconomics company in the world, being a financial instrument for businessmen” and that “on the basis of the existing cryptocurrency pool and its increase with the sale of memberships [would be] able to buy and sell large quantities of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum in international exchange houses and simultaneously sell when the price rises”.
It is legitimate to have doubts about these statements, given that their actual volumes and turnover are not known, and it is hard to believe that they may be higher than, for example, giants such as Binance or Coinbase.
