Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of Mt Gox, will head to trial in the coming week over charges stemming from the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin from the service in 2014. His lawyer Kiichi Iino told AFP that Karpeles is remaining calm as the trial gets started and the defendant plans to plead his innocence.
Mr Karpeles was arrested in August 2015 but was released on bail in 2016. He currently works as an IT consultant and is active on social media where he comments on issues concerning Bitcoin in general, save details of his criminal case.
One of those that lost their bitcoins on Mt Gox was British investor, Kolin Burges who hopes to get some of his money back as a result of the trial, speaking to AFP he said:
“The charges only cover a subset of the issues which were happening at Mt Gox, so I don’t expect that we will find out most of the information we want to know. I’ve not had any back yet but hopefully, eventually all the creditors will get a small percentage of their money back from the bankruptcy distribution.”
Following the Mt Gox scandal a few years ago, Japan passed a bill requiring all virtual currency exchanges to be regulated by its Financial Services Agency.