Lithuania’s Financial Crime Investigation Service (FNTT) has launched a pre-trial investigation into the circumstances surrounding Bankera’s initial coin offering (ICO).
Law enforcement opened the investigation following a report published last week by the 15min news website.
“The FNTT has decided to open a pre-trial investigation to establish all the relevant facts and assess whether any criminal offences were committed during the company’s ICO and in the use of the funds raised,” the agency said in a press release on Friday.
The investigation is led and overseen by the Criminal Prosecution Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The FNTT did not disclose which article of the Criminal Code the investigation is based on.
In late April, 15min.lt reported that 45 million euros raised through Bankera’s ICO seven years ago ended up in a bank in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. The bank had been purchased shortly before the ICO by three Bankera co-founders: Vytautas Karalevičius, Mantas Mockevičius and Justas Dobiliauskas.
After an initial surge of interest in its ICO, the Bankera digital currency collapsed, leaving many investors with losses.
The investigation by 15min.lt, conducted jointly with the international journalism network OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), found that the money was later transferred to accounts belonging to the co-founders or to companies linked to them.
On Monday, the parliamentary Anti-Corruption Commission said it would look into whether Lithuania’s relevant authorities had done everything they could to prevent this kind of criminal activity.
Bankera’s ICO had previously attracted the attention of the central Bank of Lithuania and the FNTT, but no investigation was launched at the time due to a lack of formal complaints from investors.
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