UniCredit Got Sued For Illegally Closing Crypto Mining Firm’s Accounts

Banking giant UniCredit got sued for illegally closing a mining firm’s accounts from Bosnia and Herzegovina as we can see more in our latest cryptocurrency news today.

Unicredit got sued and asked to pay a fine of $144 million for closing accounts that belonged to a crypto mining company. The district in Banja Luka in Bosnia ruled that UniCredit’s branch office in the country will have to pay a fine of 131 million EUR in damages after the lawsuit filed by the crypto mining company Bitminer Factory.

The Bitminer Factory’s subsidiary accused UniCredit of wrongfully closing the accounts held in the bank’s local branch in Banja Luka and according to the mining firm, the closure prevented the ICO associated with the projects of the company in the crypto mining sector using renewable energy in Bosnia. The company set up mining operations in Bosnia due to the country’s low energy tariff and opened a bank account with UniCredit. While the bank allowed them to withdraw profits from the sales of the accounts, the UniCredit subsidiary stopped and started that they can’t service crypto businesses.

However, the court stated that the bank can not present any evidence of written rules whcih prevented the financial institution from forming a business relationship with crypto-based companies. In the meantime, UniCredit was not happy with the ruling and appealed the judgment. As per the bank, the sentence is not definitive nor enforceable:

“Possible liability will be determined only by the definitive outcome of all available procedural remedies and not before the filing of a definitive and binding sentence by the appeals court.”

Back in January, the Italian banking giant attracted backlash from the crypto community and customers following a response to a Twitter user:

“Hello, the current Group policies prohibit relations with counterparties issuing virtual currencies or acting as exchange platforms.”

There were a few other cases of banks refusing to service accounts that belong to crypto holders. In 2021, the EU giant HSBC blocked transactions from digital asset exchanges in the UK but there are other major banks that seem to have changed from the anti-crypto stance and are offering such support. Australia’s biggest bank also announced it will offer more crypto services to the bank’s clients.