In the past, BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed entered guilty pleas to federal money laundering crimes.
Three co-founders of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange, have apparently been pardoned by US President Donald Trump after entering guilty pleas to felony charges.
Trump pardoned Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed, who were accused of a variety of crimes including money laundering and Bank Secrecy Act breaches, according to a CNBC article from March 28. Reed filed a plea a few weeks after Hayes and Delo made a guilty plea in February 2022, acknowledging that they “willfully fail[ed] to establish, implement and maintain an Anti-Money Laundering program” at BitMEX.
The White House has not issued a statement indicating that Trump intended to pardon the three individuals at the time of publishing. BitMEX was approached by Cointelegraph for comment on the pardon, but at the time of writing, Cointelegraph has not heard back.
Trump has granted a number of contentious federal pardons since becoming office on January 20. These include more than 1,500 individuals who were charged with the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the US Capitol and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, who served more than 11 years in jail. According to reports, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who was given a 25-year jail term for his involvement in the misuse of client cash, was also trying to curry favor with Republicans and Trump in hopes of receiving a pardon.
According to Changpeng Zhao, he “wouldn’t mind a pardon” from Donald Trump.
In 2020, US officials accused Gregory Dwyer, the exchange’s first employee, Delo, Reed, and Hayes of violating the Bank Secrecy Act. In the midst of the legal dispute, BitMEX’s former CEO, Hayes, resigned.
At the time of publishing, it was unclear why Trump had pardoned the three men since they had previously received sentences in 2022 that included probation and house arrest. Additionally, as part of a legal dispute with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the BitMEX co-founders were sentenced to pay $30 million in fines.
In 2021, the exchange agreed to pay $100 million in consent payments to the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Center and the CFTC as part of its proceedings with US authorities. BitMEX’s parent firm, HDR Global Trading Limited, was placed on two years of unsupervised probation and fined $100 million by a court in January.
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