The widow of Gerald Cotten, the founder and CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, has recently revealed he told her he used his own money to process customers’ withdrawals during a legal battle with a bank.
According to CoinDesk, Cotten’s wife Jennifer Robertson claimed through a statement that Cotten told her he used his won funds while the exchange was battling with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), which froze its bank account in 2018 while trying to determine the origin of its funds.
The statement sent by law firm Steward McKelvey stated:
While I had no direct knowledge of how Gerry operated the business, he told me that he had been putting his own money back into QCX to fund user withdrawals in 2018 while the CIBC money remained frozen. I believe Gerry had the best interests of the business in mind, and cared for his customers.
In her statement, Robertson also revealed the law firm would stop representing the cryptocurrency exchange over an unnamed conflict of interest, which was discovered by the court-appointed monitor Ernst & Young (EY).
Per the news outlet, the statement noted details of the conflict of interest weren’t shared with Robertson.
QuadrigACX’s Missing Funds
As CryptoGlobe has extensively covered, QuadrigaCX’s founder and CEO Gerald Cotten passed away unexpectedly last year, and was reportedly the only person with access to the exchange’s cold storage wallets, with $145 million worth of client funds in them.
The exchange has earlier this year been granted creditor protection while figuring out the situation, and reports have suggested Cotten could have been storing users’ funds in paper wallets.
EY was appointed by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court as a monitor for the exchange. It has been making progress securing some of QuadrigaCX’s fiat holding from third-party payment processors, but when it comes to the millions worth of crypto it found six empty cold storage wallets that hadn’t been used since April.
The case has seen many in the cryptocurrency space draw their own theories as to what’s going on. A researcher has claimed to have found $90 million of QuadrigaCX’s missing funds on various cryptocurrency exchanges, and various Reddit posts seem to show the Canadian trading platform’s co-founder used to take large positions on BitMEX.
What’s clear about the case 115,000 users are owed millions. One in particular, as covered, has lost his $420,000 life savings because of the exchange’s downfall.
