The Zamoskvoretsky Court in Moscow has reportedly ordered BitRiver CEO Igor Runets to be placed under house arrest on charges of tax evasion.
The founder and CEO of Russian Bitcoin mining company BitRiver, Igor Runets, has reportedly been arrested and charged with multiple counts of tax evasion.
According to reports from local media resembling RBK and Kommersant on Sunday, Runets was arrested on Friday and faces three charges for allegedly concealing assets for tax evasion.
The media cites court documents from Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky Court showing that Runets was charged on Saturday and placed under house arrest on the identical day.
Runets' legal team now has a small window of opportunity to appeal the home arrest before it becomes fully enforceable on Wednesday. If an appeal is unsuccessful or not filed, Runets will remain certain to its home country for the complete duration of the proceedings.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Runets for comment.
CEO Igor Runets speaks on the Russian-Arab Business Council forum in 2020. Source: Igor Runets
Founded in 2017, BitRiver has change into certainly one of the most important names in Russian Bitcoin mining. The company operates large data centers across Siberia that also offer crypto mining services to other firms.
At the tip of 2024, Bloomberg reported that Runets' net price had reached around $230 million through its involvement in crypto mining.
The problems are piling up for BitRiver
The company has faced several challenges because the U.S. Treasury Department first imposed sanctions in mid-2022 in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
In May 2023, certainly one of its major customers, Japanese banking giant SBI, stopped using the corporate's infrastructure for Bitcoin mining after withdrawing from Russia as a consequence of the continued conflict.
The Kommersant report said BitRiver began cost-cutting across the corporate and scaled back operations toward the tip of 2024, after which there have been delayed salary payments to employees.
In early 2025, the corporate faced two lawsuits from electric utility Infrastructure of Siberia alleging that it paid BitRiver to buy equipment under a contract but never received it.
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