The Supreme Court of South Korea sentenced the CEO of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Coinnest to jail and ordered him to pay a monetary penalty.
Coinnest CEO Kim Ik-hwan was ordered to serve a prison sentence of 18 months and to pay a fine of more than $61,000, according to Fnnews.
The incident goes back to 2018 when Mr. Kim and his former operating director Jo Mo were indicted of receiving bribery in Bitcoin.
Mr. Kim agreed to list an unnamed cryptocurrency on his platform “Coinnest” in exchange for $771,270 worth of BTC at that time.
Furthermore, Mr. Kim was later accused of fraud — transferring funds out of customer accounts into his own. In the first trial, former Coinnest and partner in committing fraud Mr. Mo said there was “no unfair solicitation.”
Prosecutors in the case commented, “The defendants acknowledged or promoted the situation that they were taking unreasonable gains by manipulating the market price on the exchange after listing the cryptocurrency. (…) This crime greatly undermined fairness and trust in cryptocurrency transactions. This is bad.”
