Representatives of the founders of the Centra Tech cryptocurrency project Robert Farkas and Sohrab Sharma are trying to avoid criminal responsibility for their clients by accusing the FBI of illegally taking possession of the details of the correspondence in the Slack messenger. Reported Decrypt .

According to them, the methods of law enforcement officers violate the constitutionally approved rights to a fair trial and therefore apply to reject the indictment or other possible relief of punishment.

The organizers of the Centra Tech project are accused of fraud during an ICO of $ 32 million in mid-2017. They face up to 20 years in prison for using fictitious information about the company's management and “non-existent business relationships” with Bancorp, Visa and Mastercard.

The position of the prosecution is based on the correspondence of members of the Centra team on Slack, the details of which were received by the FBI and attached to the case.

According to the founders of Centra, in the messenger they, together with lawyers, discussed their actions in the event of charges brought against them by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that is, the correspondence contained information that was not to be disclosed.

Experts do not undertake to predict how successful the new line of defense will be, but they note that the fact of correspondence with a lawyer does not make it confidential.

“Only correspondence related to the provision of legal advice can be considered confidential, ” said Greg Strong, lawyer at the law firm DLx Law.

He also added that even if the court agrees on violation of the constitutional rights of the defendants, this does not guarantee the termination of the criminal case, since representatives of the prosecution, who had access to confidential materials, may well be withdrawn from its consideration.

Recall that in November, the SEC fined the famous American boxer Floyd Mayweather and music producer DJ Khaled for promoting ICO of Centra Tech in social networks.

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