In the dispute that has been dragged for two years over ‘illegally’ closing a current account belonging to a cryptocurrency mining firm; the UniCredit Bank is penalised with €131 million (amounting to $143.84 million) fine to be granted to Bitminer Factory.
The reputed Italian bank’s branch office in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, had been called before the local court in a lawsuit brought up by the country’s subsidiary of the Italian crypto mining company Bitminer Factory, as reported by La Repubblica on March 27.
In the legal contest, the bank was found guilty of the illegal closure of accounts belonging to the firm which dubs itself as the “first and largest mining farm” in Italy. The court accepted the company’s grounds that it had suffered losses. Consequently, the court granted it €131 million in damages.
Bitminer Factory argued that the closure of its accounts has caused an obstruction to “its initial coin offering (ICO) in relation to a startup project in the cryptocurrency mining sector with renewable energy in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
Bitminer Factory d.o.o Gradiska was founded in Bosnia and Herzegovina because of its lower electricity costs in the country, while the affected accounts were opened with UniCredit Bank Banja Luka.
The controversy started when initially the bank accepted the firm’s multiple requests to withdraw the mined cryptocurrency. However, the bank started rejecting the same requests later on. The bank did so by saying that it is “not able to do business with digital currency suppliers and exchange platforms.”
Nevertheless, the court concluded that the bank was unable to prove that it had any such written rules that doesn’t allow it to form business relationships with clients dealing with cryptocurrencies.
The local media suggests the bank has already filed an appeal against the court’s ruling, calling it “is not definitive, binding, nor enforceable.”
UniCredit Bank had argued that its “possible liability will be determined only by the definitive outcome of all available procedural remedies and not before the filing of a definitive and binding sentence by the appeals court.”
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