Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy sued for tax evasion
Key points to remember
- The District of Columbia is suing Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy for alleged tax evasion.
- DC Attorney General Karl Racine announced the lawsuit on Twitter today, accusing Saylor of avoiding up to ten years in income taxes.
- MicroStrategy stock fell 5% following the announcement of the charges.
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Bitcoin Whale billionaire Michael Saylor is being sued by the District of Columbia, where he currently resides, for tax evasion. DC Attorney General Karl Racine made the announcement Wednesday on Twitter.
Saylor faces tax evasion lawsuit
One of Bitcoin’s biggest whales has some legal issues to contend with.
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor is facing a tax evasion lawsuit, Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine announced Wednesday.
NEW: Today we are suing Michael Saylor – a billionaire tech executive who has lived in the District for more than a decade but has never paid DC income tax – for tax evasion.
— AG Karl A. Racine (@AGKarlRacine) August 31, 2022
“Today we are suing Michael Saylor – a billionaire tech executive who has lived in the District for more than a decade but has never paid DC income tax – for tax evasion,” Racine wrote in a tweet.
Racine added that Washington DC was also suing MicroStrategy “for conspiring to help [Saylor] evade the taxes he legally owes on hundreds of millions of dollars he earned living in DC.
Michael Saylor is most notable in the crypto space for his continued and vocal public support for Bitcoin. He appears frequently on crypto conference circuits to extol the merits of the market’s flagship cryptocurrency and encourage attendees to accumulate as much as possible.
In this regard, Saylor puts his money where his mouth is; his company, MicroStrategy, which was originally a business intelligence software company, pivoted to a bitcoin accumulation strategy under Saylor’s leadership. Earlier this month, Saylor stepped down as CEO of MicroStrategy but remained chairman of the board; he also assumed a substantial leadership position focused on “Bitcoin acquisition strategy and Bitcoin-related advocacy initiatives.”
This isn’t the first time Saylor and his company have had trouble with law enforcement. In 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil accounting fraud charges against MicroStrategy for misrepresenting the company’s financial information for two years. This case ended with a regulation this led Saylor to personally disgorge $8.2 million and pay an additional $350,000 in penalties.
Abandoned MicroStrategy shares 6% at the news of the trial.
Disclosure: At the time of writing this article, the authors of this article owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies. This story is breaking and will be updated as new details emerge.
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