The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) repeatedly appealed to the court with a request to receive evidence from John Hyman, whom Pavel Durov Telegram CEO called the chief investment adviser of the company and the person “involved in the distribution of Gram tokens”. It is reported by CoinDesk with reference to documents sent to the court.
Related: Telegram will pay $235000 to developers of solutions for TON
The documents contain new details of Hyman's correspondence with investors of the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain project. In particular, in one of them, Telegram employee Shyam Parekh talked about how investor money will go into the company's accounts. He noted that they will receive funds through BNY, which will redirect them to Credit Suisse AG. And he provided an international bank code for transferring money to Credit Suisse through SWIFT.
Both banks declined to comment.
In addition, some TON investors and the amount of their investment became known from the correspondence. Major investors included Kleiner Perkins, who invested $30 million, Lightspeed China, which invested $25 million, and FBG Capital with $10 million.
The names of several small investors who participated through a fund managed by Elysium Ventures also became known. Among them, for example, WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and others. In total, through Elysium TON received $12 million investment.
In one of the conversations to the question of where the funds came from, Hyman replied that a lot of money comes from Russia, the CIS, quite a lot from Israel and Pasha’s (Pavel Durov) fan club.
Recall that last week the SEC filed with the Federal Court of Southern District of New York documents according to which the Commission appealed to the High Court of England and Wales with a request for interrogation of Hyman. They also disclosed part of the correspondence with investors.