According to Cointelegraph, Amir Bruno Elmaani, the 31-year-old founder of the now-defunct cryptocurrency scheme Oyster Protocol, has been handed the maximum sentence of four years in prison for tax evasion. The United States Attorneyâs Office said on Oct. 31 that Elmaani, also known by the alias âBruno Block,â was sentenced to prison following his April 6 guilty plea where he admitted to secretly minting and selling Pearl tokens while not paying income tax on a swathe of profits from the project. Elmaani admitted that he caused tax losses of over $5.5 million.
Between September and October 2017, Elmaani promoted a cryptocurrency called Pearl (PRL), marketed as a way for investors to purchase data on a blockchain-based data storage platform called Oyster Protocol. However, under the nose of the Oyster Protocolâs team and investors, Elmaani secretly minted a mass of new PRL tokens and dumped them on the market for his own personal gain in October 2018. Despite raking in millions of dollars from the exit scheme, Elmaani filed a tax return in 2017 claiming he had only earned a total of $15,000 from a patent design business and reported zero income to the tax authorities in 2018.
The court found that in 2018, Elmaani spent more than $10 million on multiple yachts, $1.6 million at a carbon-fiber composite company, hundreds of thousands of dollars at home improvement stores, and more than $700,000 to purchase two homes. One home was purchased through a shell company, the other was under the names of two of Elmaaniâs associates. He also âdealt substantiallyâ in precious metals and kept gold bars in a safe on one of the yachts he owned. In addition to his four-year prison sentence, Elmaani was sentenced to one year of supervised release and was ordered to pay $5.5 million in restitution.
