Bitfinex makes a bid to recover over $850M in frozen funds

The parent company of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, iFinex, Inc., wants its money back. The company is embroiled in a lawsuit brought down by the New York attorney general as a result of a loan it received from Tether to cover more than $850 million that disappeared thanks to former partners, and is now going after those partners in order to try to recuperate the funds. It has filed a claim in California that is designed to pave the way toward that recuperation.

An application for discovery was filed (in pdf) last Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Southern California. It is trying to get testimony out of individuals tied to Global Trade Solutions, AG, which operated as Crypto Capital, and other companies to which iFinex had deposited its funds. Crypto Capital was previously a payment processor for the exchange from 2014 to 2018.

Since the end of 2018, Crypto Capital has asserted that its holdings, which were located in Poland, the U.S., the U.K. and Portugal, had been seized by those countries’ respective governments and the lack of access to the funds on the part of iFinex isn’t its fault.

To try to clear up the issue, iFinex wants the court to order Rondell “Rhon” Clyde Monroe, a VP of TCA Investment Bancorp and Trust Company, to provide testimony and documents related to the firm’s dealings with Crypto Capital. Bitfinex asserts that Monroe and TCA have about $306 million of its money and that they’re hiding the funds in another company, G.T.S. Resources Limited out of the U.K.

G.T.S. is owned by Reginald Fowler, who is currently under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Bitfinex asserts that it wasn’t aware of a relationship between TCA and G.T.S. and that, had it known, it wouldn’t have formed a business relationship with TCA.

To help get to the bottom of the entangled banking relationships and find out where it’s money is, Bitfinex hopes the courts can force the mystery to be unraveled and require Crypto Capital to reveal all ownerships and accounts at banks that include HSBC, Citibank, Bank of America, Sun Trust, TD Bank, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and others.