According to The Wall Street Journal, BitMEX exchange co-founder Benjamin Delo was sentenced to thirty months probation by a New York federal court Wednesday for breaching the anti-money laundering Banking Secrecy Act.
Benjamin Delo’s involvement in the BitMEX legal process, which has been underway since October 2020, has come to an end with this sentence. Delo will “possibly within days” return to his spouse and house in Hong Kong, where he will complete his probation.
Benjamin Delo and Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of BitMEX, pled guilty to “willfully neglecting to design, execute, and manage an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program” in February.
Benjamin Delo Avoids Jail Time
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined Benjamin Delo, along with co-founder Samuel Reed and CEO Arthur Hayes, $10 million apiece in May for breaking anti-money laundering regulations. Delo made a complete payment on his half.
According to federal authorities, the three failed to implement know-your-customer (KYC) protocols for their U.S. client base, implying that their exchange acted as a de facto money laundering platform, processing up to $209 million in dubious transactions. “We are glad that the Court properly rejected the government’s opportunistic attempt to overstate the gravity of the Bank Secrecy Act accusation in this case,” a representative for Smith Villazor, the company defending Delo, said.
Today’s probationary sentence acknowledged that this case entailed a failure in compliance that resulted in a regulatory breach – and nothing more.” The Department of Justice, along with the CFTC and FinCEN, announced that BitMEX and its founders had violated both criminal and civil statutory provisions by letting U.S. citizens exchange crypto financial products on the swap despite the fact that it was not registered in the country and had poor know-your-customer (KYC) practices.
The exchange itself concluded with the CFTC and FinCEN last year, agreeing to a $100 million punishment divided between the two agencies after the allegations were published.
