The CEO of Mt.Gox, Mark Karpeles, has been ordered to appear in court in the US, to try and explain how his company could lose Bitcoin valued at around $400 million and then file for bankruptcy. Judge Stacey Jernigan made the order on Tuesday and means that Karpeles will have to appear in court on April 17th in Dallas at his lawyers office.
The objective of the court order is to try and figure out if Karpeles and other insiders of Mt.Gox potentially misused customers funds or even stole them deliberately. Mt.Gox filed for bankruptcy in February in Tokyo and then Karpeles asked to be granted bankruptcy protection to the Dallas court, which was mainly to stop the class action lawsuit that some U.S. customers had filed in Chicago.
“If he avails himself of this court, my God, he is going to get himself over here,” Jenigan said at the bankruptcy Court hearing. John Mitchell, a Baker &McKenzie attorney told her that the company may replace Karpeles and be “the foreign representative” in the Mt.Gox case, which Jenigan didn’t find suiting, saying; “He filed this case,”.
Karpeles was the person in charge of Mt.Gox’s finances and might be the only person who can shed some light on what happened exactly with the large Bitcoin exchange. He may also know of any funds and Bitcoins that are hidden somewhere, which could mean that repayments could be done.