Vladimir Smerkis, the former head of the Division of Russia of Binance, was arrested in Russia for being connected to a case of large -scale criminal fraud, the local media Tass reported on Sunday.
The District Court of Zamoskvoretsky, which resides in Moscow, granted the request of a investigator to stop Smerkis, a source of an agency to apply the unidentified law told TASS. The report did not share specific details of the fraud case. Coendesk could not contact the Zamoskvoretsky district court for more information.
Smerkis co -founded the Blum commercial application in December 2023, but the company said on Saturday in X that it had resigned from its role as marketing director and is no longer involved in the project. It has also been the managing partner of four other companies, including Tokenbox.io and the Token Fund, according to LinkedIn.
Before starting Blum, Smerkis worked for the Binance Crypto Exchange since 2022 for just under two years. At that time he was the head of Russia and then the head of his Commonwealth of Independent State (CIS) business, according to LinkedIn. The CIS is a group of 11 nations that coordinate in key decisions such as trade and legislation; Russia is among those nations.
Binance did not return a request for comments.
