A former senior manager at a major Chinese cryptocurrency exchange has been acquitted by a Hong Kong court of secretly moving five million Tether, with a market value of about HK$39 million (US$5 million), to his own accounts six years ago.
A seven-member High Court jury reached the verdict on Friday to find Chen Boliang, who used to work at cryptocurrency firm Huobi – now known as HTX – not guilty of accessing its platform to trade in the dark pool under an individual account he created with an alias between February 27 and March 14, 2020.
Dark pool trading involves institutional investors trading privately without publicly disclosing the transactions, the buy and sell prices and the number of shares traded.
Prosecutors alleged that Chen set up a Huobi account under the name of “Chen Feng” in January 2020.
One month later, Chen began using that individual account, which was registered with a mainland identification card, and three other company accounts over which he had control on Huobi to trade in the dark pool.
After a day of deliberation, the jury returned a majority verdict finding insufficient evidence to prove that the defendant was the controller of the “Chen Feng” account, as evidence showed that his accounts on other crypto exchanges – Binance and OKX – had received a large number of cryptocurrency transfers from the Huobi accounts over the period in question.