Canada’s law firms Miller Thomson and Cox & Palmer were appointed by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to represent some 115,000 customers of the QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange. The firms will work closely with affected QuadrigaCX users, who are owed about $260 million, as a court-appointed monitor continues to look for the money they lost.
More than a dozen lawyers filed competing submissions in Halifax before the court justice Michael Wood, who then appointed said firms as counsels to represent creditors in the ongoing QuadrigaCX litigation.
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Miller Thomson and Cox & Palmer are now tasked with the mission to recover C$190 million in cryptocurrencies plus another C$70 million in cash from the shuttered Vancouver-based exchange. Legal representation for QuadrigaCX’s victims would give them a slice of the administrative charges to cover their professional fees while advocating on clients’ behalf over any issues that might appear.
“The Court has received competing motions by or on behalf of users of the Applicants’ platform. They all seek essentially the same relief, which is: 1. appointment of a representative creditors committee of users; 2. appointment of representative legal counsel to act on behalf of affected users on the instructions of the representative committee; and 3. providing access to the existing administrative charge over the assets of the Applicants to secure payment of the reasonable fees and disbursements of the representative counsel,” the court further explains.
QuadrigaCX misplaced another $500,000
QuadrigaCX was shut down last month following the sudden death of its founder and CEO Gerald Cotton in December. The five-year-old business reportedly misplaced another $500,000 in cold wallets. Court documents say the $190 million in missing cryptocurrency is locked in offline digital wallets while Cotton was the only person who had the password to the company’s wallets.
In the meantime, the court-appointed representative counsel for employees and retirees because that “vulnerable group had little means to pursue a claim in the complex CCAA proceedings.”
At one point, the monitor appointed by the court, Ernst & Young, said lawyers’ fees at this stage should be capped at $100,000. However, QuadrigaCX officials claim the exchange has now run out of money.
“As of today, we don’t have anything,” Maurice Chiasson, a lawyer representing the insolvent exchange admitted last week.
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