Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox , said in an ‘Ask me anything’ Reddit Q&A session that he doesn’t want to profit millions of dollars which will be left after paying out claims of the exchange’s creditors.
Despite his responsibility for turning the largest Bitcoin exchange into a bankrupt company, the French-born Karpelès could stand to gain 160,000 Bitcoins and Bitcoin Cash from the remaining assets in the Gox estate.
Those assets, currently valued at $1.13 billion, will be distributed to shareholders as part of the liquidation. This is because the value of creditors’ claims is calculated in the exchange rate between Bitcoin and Japanese yen on the bankruptcy date, April 2014, instead of current rates.
“I don't want this. I don't want this billion dollars. From day one I never expected to receive anything from this bankruptcy. The fact that today this is a possibility is an aberration and I believe it is my responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen,” said Karpelès.
To achieve that, the 33-year-old French national said he met with the bankruptcy trustee appointed by the Tokyo court to commence civil rehabilitation proceedings.
“That's the only way any bankruptcy law can reasonably work. And yet, in this case, it produces an egregiously distasteful outcome in that the shareholders of MtGox would walk away with the value of over 160,000 bitcoin as a result of what happened.”
Karpelès explained that Mt.Gox has two shareholders, Tibanne and Jed McCaleb. The Tokyo-based exchange is 88-percent owned by Tibanne, of which Karpelès is the sole owner. The remaining 12 percent are held by Mt. Gox’s original creator Jed McCaleb, a San Francisco-based programmer who currently works with Stellar.
Throughout the AMA threads, Karpelès revealed that in addition to his own legal troubles, Tibanne is currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings. As such, he doesn’t mind redistributing the BTC/BCH to creditors if they ever happen to be given to him, but he hopes “things won't get that far as a very large chunk would end being lost to taxes, that's why Civil Rehabilitation is so important.”
To date, Karpelès has denied any wrongdoing and blamed hackers for the lost bitcoins, pointing to a software security flaw.
