A court order was issued to OKPay, a payment processing company, forcing it to make payments that came to as much as $6.1 million to Mt Gox it has advised in defence of its transferral of the withheld deposits.
In the time just prior to the collapse of Mt Gox a huge number of payments belonging to individual customers of OKPay valued at $6,014,910 were handed over to the troubled bitcoin exchange.
OKPay had originally intended to give all of the money back to its customer and up to that point, which was around the middle of August, the funds had been sat in an account owned by Mt Gox in a state of limbo.
Following the receipt of an order from the courts in the British Virgin Islands, which is the registered location of OKPay, is was advised that Mt Gox legally owned the account and at this point the repayment of customers funds was no longer an option according to Konstantin Romanovsky, the CEO at OKPay.
Romanovsky advised that Mt Gox had forbidden it to return the money to customers even though it had originally fought hard to be able to do this. The order, however, to not return the money to its customers and instead place it in a Trustee Fund for Mt Gox came once they reached the court stage. He went on to add that although it may have had a serious impact on their image it was a decision that had been taken out of their hands by the courts at the BVI.
He also claimed that the rumours that had been spread claiming that for a number of reasons OKPay would also be closing down were complete nonsense and completely refuted them.
A message that had originally been sent out by OKPay advising that customer deposits that hadn’t been sent to Mt Gox would be sent back to customers had been posted by customers on a bitcoin forum. Customers were advised that because the payments made by OKPay were made following a court order there would be no point in taking any kind of legal action even though many customers had said they would be willing to do so.
It is likely, however, that any addition funds would, at the end of the case, be sent to creditors as they would be seen to be Mt Gox property, although no reason had officially been given for the litigation by the BVI.
Following a $200,000 payment to a Tibane, a parent company of Mt Gox, which is also owned by Mark Karpeles, the company’s CEO, there has been a great deal of displeasure shown by creditor at the way payments have been distributed so far since Mt Gox closed its door in February 2014.
Transactions using bitcoin exchanges including Mt Gox had been suspended by OKPay as far back as May 2013 as the company had advised that a number of its banking partners had said that payments using the bitcoin currency was not something they were comfortable with, although this is something that it reviewed later and it now uses a number of exchanges to trade bitcoins.