Vladimir Smerkis, the former chief of the Binance Russia division, was arrested in Russia for having been linked to a large -scale criminal fraud case, the local media reported on Sunday.
The district court of Zamoskvoretsky, which resides in Moscow, gave a request from the investigator to hold Smerkis, Tass told TASS an agency for the application of the nameless law. The report did not share the specific details of the fraud case. Coindesk could not contact the district court of Zamoskvoretsky for more information.
Smerkis co -founded the Blum trading application in December 2023, but the company said on X on Saturday that it had left its role as director of marketing and was no longer involved in the project. He was also a partner director of four other companies, including Tokenbox.io and the Token Fund according to Linkedin.
Before starting Blum, Smerkis worked for the Binance Crypto Exchange from 2022 for just under two years. At that time, he was the head of Russia and later the chief of his activity of the independent states (CIS), according to Linkedin. The CIS is a group of 11 nations which coordinate on key decisions such as trade and legislation; Russia is one of these nations.
Binance did not return a comment request.
