South Korean regulator in cryptocurrency insider trading probe

Thursday, 18/01/2018 | 10:01 GMT-0

Story breaking from Finance Magnates this morning 18 Jan

Say FM:

Choi Heung Sik, the head of the Financial Supervisory Service of South Korea, responded in the affirmative when asked if employees of the financial regulator had sold their cryptocurrency stocks just before the agency publicly proposed measures against the industry, which caused cryptocurrency prices to drop.

When asked if there were such employees inside the agency, Heung Sik responded:

"Yes."The matter is now being investigate", according to Yonhap news.

Hong Nam Ki, the Director of the Office of Coordination, said (translated from Korean):

"The relationship between the inside and the outside of the company [is being] investigated by one or two civil servants as I know, and I would like to ask government officials to refrain from investing...There is a bar. "

At a meeting on the 28th of December, Heung Sik told journalists that he 'bet' that the Bitcoin bubble was on its way to bursting. This comment was made just before the country banned anonymous transactions. Since then, comments were made from within the government (from justice minister Park Sang-ki, to name names) indicating that the country is going to ban cryptocurrency trading entirely, which led to an outcry - according to the Korea Herald, protests were held and posters put up calling the Moon Jae-in government tyrants "for attempting to unilaterally shut down a booming market worth 300 trillion won (US$282 billion)."