Mark Karpeles, the former chief executive officer of Mt. Gox, a Japan-based bitcoin exchange that went bankrupt after a massive hack, is appealing his conviction on charges of manipulating electronic data.
Karpeles’ lawyer Nobuyasu Ogata on Friday said that his client was just trying to reduce risks for Mt. Gox users.
The Tokyo District Court cleared Karpeles earlier this month of embezzlement and breach of trust charges, handing him a suspended sentence, meaning he would not have to serve jail time.
However, he was found guilty of the dubious data charges.
The court said he had manipulated data to harm his clients, betraying their trust and abusing his engineering skills.
Prosecutors had demanded 10 years in prison.
Karpeles, a 33-year-old Frenchman and longtime resident of Japan, was arrested in August 2015.
He said that he decided to appeal because the judge had not fully looked at the defense arguments.
Ogata said he welcomed the court’s ruling on Karpeles’ innocence of some charges as “a proper decision.”
He defended Karpeles’ actions following the massive bitcoin theft by still unidentified hackers as an effort to minimize the damage.
“We cannot think of such actions as illegitimate,” he said in a statement.
Ogata has argued the authorities were confused about how cryptocurrency exchanges work and were trying to pin the blame for a cybercrime on Karpeles, who was actually a victim.
Bitcoin has been a legal form of payment in Japan since April 2017, and a handful of major retailers accept bitcoin payments.
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