January 12 (SeeNews) - The Bulgarian police raided the Sofia offices of Bulgaria-founded, Switzerland-based digital assets platform Nexo, as part of a global operation against large-scale financial crime, money laundering and evasion of sanctions against Russia, public broadcaster BNT reported on Thursday.
Two Nexo directors fled to Dubai in the autumn of 2022, following the launch of an investigation into the company's activities in the US, BNT said, citing unnamed sources.
In September, eight US states filed legal actions against a Cayman Islands-registered entity in the Nexo group in relation to unregistered crypto interest-bearing accounts.
The Bulgarian investigation into the activities of the cryptocurrency company started several months ago, after foreign security services detected suspicious transactions, allegedly aimed at circumventing the sanctions imposed by the European Union, the UK and the US against Russian banks as well as companies and citizens of the Russian Federation, BNT added.
According to the report, the company's operations were carried out from the Bulgarian capital, with depositors promised high returns on investments in bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrencies. The investigation also allegedly found that company directors from Bulgaria embezzled some of the assets worth several billion dollars.