Ukraine passes crypto law based on FATF guidelines according to a report by Cointelegraph. The law makes KYC mandatory and introduces other features to counter the possible use of cryptocurrencies to evade anti-money laundering processes.
On Dec. 6, the Rada, Ukraine’s legislative body, published a final version of the law that considers virtual assets to be a store of wealth, while also recognizing its potential use in financial crimes, such as money laundering, fraud, and the financing of terrorists.
The new law includes some guidelines on how the government intends to monitor and regulate the trading of cryptocurrencies. One of the guidelines focuses on individual crypto transactions worth less than 30,000 hriven ($1,300), from which the government will only collect the public key of the sender for the purpose of financial monitoring.
However, once the transaction exceeds that amount, the government will apply verification to both sender and receiver. The process will include identity verification, as well as the verification of the nature of the business relationship.
For VASP’s the threshold sits above the 40,000 hryvnya ($1,600) price level. In that case VASP’s should provide the authorities with information when traders are registered in jurisdictions that do not comply with anti-money laundering recommendations, when traders are family members, when traders are foreigners, and when cash transactions occur. Ukraine passes crypto law to ensure anti-money laundering guidelines.
Telegram advisor may have to testify
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is pushing the UK court system to get Telegram’s former chief investment advisor John Hyman to testify in the case over the firm’s Grams tokens offering. The SEC’s request was revealed by documents filed by the regulator with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York yesterday.
Telegram has locked horns with the SEC because their GRAM Initial Token Offering was not registered correctly. Telegram claims that the allegations against them was false.
SEC is convinced that Telegram’s Grams tokens are unregistered securities. According to the regulator, Telegram claimed that its Grams Purchase Agreements but did not claim the same about the actual tokens. Furthermore, “in any event, the exemption from registration under Regulation D is not available to Telegram.”
Per the filing, the SEC is looking to obtain Hyman’s testimony because of his involvement in Telegram’s fundraising efforts. He reportedly communicated with “over a dozen” investors of the firm’s Telegram Open Network (TON). According to the documents, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov defined him in January last year as the person who “runs the distribution of Grams.”
The U.S. regulator requested the U.K.’s authorities to issue a Letter of Request for Hyman’s deposition, given that he is a United Kingdom’s citizen and resides there. According to the filing, the SEC attorney previously contacted Hyman’s counsel and Hyman agreed to appear for a voluntary deposition.
Still, later Hyman’s counsel allegedly “refused to return multiple phone calls and emails regarding Mr. Hyman’s deposition.” Other than his testimony, the SEC is also looking to obtain copies of Hyman’s written communications with Telegram’s leadership and investors, documents about his employment at Telegram and his own investment in grams.
As Cointelegraph reported at the end of November, a United States federal judge has preserved the SEC’s move to strike Telegram’s defence “for vagueness/lack of notice.”
