Venezuelan court overturns confiscation of over 1,600 ASIC miners

During the trial, the court of Caracas ordered Sunacrip to return the miners to their owner, Sierramoros.

According to court documents, Venezuela’s National Crypto-Assets and Related Operations Administration (Sunacrip), by seizing equipment,
violated “The right to defense and due process, and the ownership of the plaintiff”.

During the trial, it turned out that the seized equipment was in storage with a third-party company providing services for the maintenance of miners, which is not the owner of the equipment. The court indicated that the procedure for confiscating the miners was carried out in violation of formalities. According to the law, the seizure was to be carried out 15 days after the drawing up of the act.

Venezuela’s National Directorate of Crypto-Assets and Related Operations confiscated the equipment on the day the deed was drawn up. The judge also considered a lawsuit from the owner of the equipment, who believes that the confiscated equipment could have been used for Bitcoin mining until the trial was concluded, because the Sunacrip employee who oversaw the operation did not disclose the location of the confiscated ASIC miners.

During the proceedings, the court ordered Sunacrip to return the confiscated 12 Antminer S9 / S9I, 1,624 EBANG E9I and 1,475 power supplies to Sierramoros, which will keep the equipment until the case is closed. The court’s decision states that Sierramoros has the right to keep miners, but cannot use it to mine cryptocurrencies until the trial is over.

According to the new legislation, from September 2020, Sunacrip began to tightly control the mining of cryptocurrencies. The decision came after Venezuela allowed the import of mining equipment into the country, which has been banned since 2018. In November, Sunacrip, police and power company employees closed a clandestine data center in Miranda state and confiscated 100 pieces of mining equipment.