In a surprising move, former US President Donald Trump has reportedly granted pardons to three co-founders of BitMEX, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange. Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed had previously pleaded guilty to a variety of criminal charges tied to money laundering and violating the Bank Secrecy Act. The motivation and precise details surrounding Trump’s pardon remain unclear at this time.
Hayes and Delo confessed in February 2022 to willfully failing to set up, execute, and uphold an Anti-Money Laundering program within BitMEX. Reed acknowledged his culpability a few weeks later. Despite this groundbreaking news, no official statement has been released from the White House to confirm these pardonings, and no response has been received from BitMEX when queried regarding this report.
Since his inauguration on January 20, Trump has authorized several contentious pardons. These include the absolution of over 1,500 individuals indicted for their implication in the January 6, 2021, upheaval at the US Capitol, and the Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence. It has also been suggested that Sam Bankman-Fried, former FTX CEO jailed for 25 years for misuse of customer funds, was keen to win favour with Trump and the Republicans in search of possible clemency.
Following the guilty pleas, Delo, Reed, and Hayes had received sentences in 2022 that encompassed home confinement and probation. They were also instructed to forfeit $30 million in penalties associated with a civil case in the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It’s worth noting that BitMEX and US authorities had agreed to consent payments totaling $100 million, dividable between the CFTC and the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Center in 2021. Further penalties for BitMEX’s parent company, HDR Global Trading Limited, incorporated a $100 million fine and two years of unsupervised probation, imposed in January.