The U.S. Treasury Department is looking into Kraken, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, for alleged sanctions violations, including allowing Iranians and others to trade digital assets on its platform. The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department has reportedly been looking into the cryptocurrency exchange since 2019, which is led by CEO Jesse Powell.
The company would be required to pay a fine and become the biggest cryptocurrency company in the United States to face enforcement action from the Treasury Department for allegedly breaking sanctions put in place against Iran in 1979.
The company was hit with a $1.25 million fine by the CFTC just last year for running an illegal trading service. Also in 2019, CEO Jesse Powell allegedly thought about breaching the law in a number of situations as long as the advantages outweighed the drawbacks.
Then, in the present, Powell has stirred up a great deal of controversy both inside and outside the company by promising to pay off workers who were unhappy with the work environment he had established and then claiming he did not feel bad about offending them.
When Powell resisted having to freeze the accounts of all Russian citizens, a new problematic scenario between Powell and the American authorities arose. All petitions to freeze the accounts of people on the blacklist were granted, and he obliged with them all, but he said it would be wrong to subject all Russian citizens to penalties.
According to a spreadsheet that was provided on the company’s Slack channel, Kraken continued to permit residents of Iran, Syria, and Cuba to use exchange accounts, the New York Times claimed. Since then, the spreadsheet has been removed from the site.
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