The now-bankrupt Celsius is slated for a long court battle featuring one more defendant: Wintermute Trading Ltd.
Celsius case has a new defendant: Wintermute Trading Ltd. A recent court filing revealed that Celsius creditors have amended their lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey to include the London-based company run by Evgeny Gaevoy and his wife, Maria Gurevitch.
Court filing. Source: US District Court, District of New Jersey
According to the plaintiffs, Wintermute Trading Ltd. helped Celsius executives manipulate the price of Celsius’s native coin CEL by “unlawfully manipulate and profit from the illegal wash trading of unregistered CEL Tokens.“. This includes wash trading, i.e., duping others into believing that a certain asset is trading at a higher volume than it actually is.
The creditors further state that both the Celsius executives and Wintermute acted with “scienter in connection with the manipulative acts alleged,” while the former lacked measures to prevent improper market-making.
“The supposed controls were virtually non-existent, and those that did exist did not monitor for or protect against “wash trading” or self-dealing,” the filing states, adding that “Defendant Wintermute and the Executive Defendants engaged in a scheme that artificially inflated the trading volume of the CEL tokens sold and marketed by Celsius.”
The illicit activity was reportedly revealed through “publicly available internal conversations” between Celsius executives, with the activities allegedly taking place between March 2021 “until the Celsius froze withdrawals in June 2022.”
Wintermute previously received attention from Forbes. In December 2022, the outlet published a detailed story about their rise to riches, noting that in 2019, Wintermute had just $500,000 to trade with and brought in less than $1 million in revenue.
Just recently, Celsius’s assets were acquired through an auction by the crypto consortium Fahrenheit. It received its institutional loan portfolio, staked cryptocurrencies, mining units, and other alternative investments, which comes almost a year after Celsius initially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 2022.
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