Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, filed a lawsuit against a Bloomberg subsidiary alleging multiple accounts of defamation.
The lawsuit was filed in the High Court of Hong Kong on July 25, and a Memorandum of Law was filed in the District Court of the Southern District of New York in relation to the case. The subsidiary is Bloomberg Businessweek’s Hong Kong publisher Modern Media CL.
The court filing states that the related article, titled “Can Crypto’s Richest Man Stand the Cold?”, had “several serious and defamatory allegations made against Binance and Zhao that were completely unsubstantiated,” claiming it was designed to mislead readers into thinking that the CEO and exchange were partaking in illegal or unsavory activities.
In this case, the article title’s Chinese translation featured a different headline alleging that Zhao was running a Ponzi scheme. The case also points to several remarks made in the article, implying that Binance was involved in money laundering, fraud, and hacking, and features a quote that called Binance a “massive shitcoin casino” without providing identification or verification of the trader.
This is not the first time that CEO Changpeng Zhao has filed defamation lawsuits against media publications. He previously sued venture capital firm Sequoia for defamation in 2019 and Forbes in 2020, later dropping the latter.
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