Walter Finch
A PAIR of wanted crypto tycoons face arrest warrants after failing to turn up in court.
The two operators of shamed crypto exchange Globix failed to show up at Gibraltar Supreme Court yesterday.
Gibraltarian Damien Carreras and his associate, Russian Pavel Sidirov, did not respond to the court or even send legal representation for an initial hearing.
Their company went into liquidation last month amid accusations of fraud, theft and it being a possible ‘Ponzi scheme’.
Despite their no-show, there will be a further hearing on June 13, which they must attend or, according to Olive Press legal sources, face arrest warrants for contempt of court.
The case is still a civil matter with no criminal charges yet brought.
Gibraltar police told the Olive Press they are ‘aware of the Globix issue’, but as the proceedings are still at a civil stage they are not currently involved.
However, the court has already taken out injunctions and disclosure orders against the pair, who are believed to be in Barcelona, Alicante and possibly Palma.
On top of demanding all documentation on the firm, the injunction blocks them – and a mysterious ‘unknown person’ – from accessing the Globix funds.
In spite of effectively ceasing to trade in June last year and freezing hundreds of investors out of their funds on the platform, Globix only went offline on March 23 this year.
This came nearly a full two weeks after the company went into liquidation on March 10 and while liquidators were themselves attempting to gain access to the system.
They are tasked with unravelling the whereabouts of the missing millions, which Carreras, 39, had claimed were in the hands of a mysterious Ukrainian IT firm.
But officers of the court investigating the inner workings of the company soon dismissed this story as ‘unlikely’.
They determined that the missing millions, scattered across a large number of online ‘crypto wallets’, were completely possible to locate and accessible.
They have discovered that millions of euros in the wallets ‘were vanishing’ over a space of months that included the period when Globix was experiencing ‘payment processing issues.’
Just three weeks ago on March 23, €4 million mysteriously disappeared from one Globix wallet containing €14 million.
The injunctions against accessing the crypto wallets remain in place and are believed to be the first of their kind in Gibraltar.
READ MORE:
- EXCLUSIVE: Liquidators probing Globix close in on suspicious payments taken out of the company
- Kidnap, crypto and Ukrainians: The multimillion-euro scandal that looks to have defrauded hundreds in Spain and Gibraltar
- Liquidators probing whether crypto exchange Globix was ‘a fraud or Ponzi scheme’ as the CEO flees to Barcelona
