US Lawyers Refuse To Defend Russia's Vinnik As Consider Case Politically Motivated

US lawyers refuse to take up the case of Russian national Alexander Vinnik, whose extradition US requested on charges of laundering billions of dollars in digital currency bitcoin, because they view this case as political one, Vinnik's lawyer Timofey Musatov told Sputnik

ATHENS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th October, 2018) US lawyers refuse to take up the case of Russian national Alexander Vinnik, whose extradition US requested on charges of laundering billions of Dollars in digital Currency bitcoin, because they view this case as political one, Vinnik's lawyer Timofey Musatov told Sputnik.

Vinnik was arrested in Greece in July 2017 at the request of the US authorities on various charges, including laundering from $4 billion to $9 billion through bitcoin cryptocurrency exchange BTC-E, which he allegedly operated. Vinnik is also wanted for separate fraud and money-laundering charges in Russia and France. Meanwhile, the BTC-E exchange has said that the Russian national had never been engaged in its activities. The suspect himself has denied the US accusations.

In December 2017, the Greek Supreme Court upheld the decision to extradite Vinnik to the United States. However, in July 2018 Greece agreed to extradite Vinnik to France under a European warrant instead. On Wednesday, the Greek Supreme Court postponed consideration of the appeal on the extradition of Vinnik to France to Monday, October 22.

Musatov said earlier in October that Vinnik's defense intends to explore if criminal proceedings against his client in France and in the United States were initiated in accordance with local laws and intends to appeal them.

"Six well-known lawyers in the United States refused to take on the case," Musatov told Sputnik.

According to him, he knew well three of the six lawyers, and they were ready to take this case.

"The surprising thing is that I had three candidates, who were willing to work, but they all refused, and the refusal is not related to payment issues. They claimed that this was a political case and that they did not want to take it ... So that means that this is the US government versus Vinnik," Musatov explained.

The defender said that a local lawyer was already handling Vinnik's case in France.

"We have a lawyer in France. At the moment he is studying the case on filing a complaint. At the same time, there is already a complaint in the record of the examination and we are waiting for a response to it.

And the French lawyer will support it. He has already subpoenaed documents from the prosecutor's office. We will look through them and, depending on the results, proceedings will be instituted," Musatov said.

Musatov also claimed that the rights of his defendant were violated.

"Vinnik is always on the road. Last night he was brought from Thessaloniki to Athens, thrown on a cold floor in prison. He slept on the floor and came to court in the morning, and he is hardly ready to defend himself: point one. But the most important thing is that we saw judges on the bench who had been involved in making decision to extradite Vinnik to the United States," the lawyer said.

He noted that three judges ruled to extradite Vinnik to the United States in December 2017.

"We consider it unacceptable that judges who have already made this kind of decision will be ruling on whether [Vinnik] can be extradited to France. There are serious contradictions � the interest of the judges," Musatov said.

The defense at the hearing requested the disqualification of judges. According to Musatov, there was a huge amount of other contradictions in the case.

The lawyer called Vinnik's case a unique one because it was connected with the IT technologies.

"This case is probably the precursor and the precedence for many cases related to the IT sphere in the future. Europeans do not really understand what the IT sphere is. America is better at this, but Europe has fallen behind behind Russia in the understanding of this issue. This affects the decision-making. The court is not able to assess the information related to the IT-sphere, and therefore is not able to make fair decisions," Musatov believes.

According to him, Washington believes that the internet should be regulated by US law, because it originated in the United States.

"If the world does not understand this, then the world needs to get used to it, because the United States claims its primacy and hegemony on the Internet," the lawyer concluded.