French court sentences former Holograph employee to 5 years in prison, 2 years to be served.

According to TechFlow, on November 8, AFP reported that a Paris Correctional Court handed down a five-year prison sentence on Friday to a man, with two years to be served in actual imprisonment and an additional 36-month probation period; he was charged with illegally minting and stealing one billion tokens from a cryptocurrency platform registered in the Cayman Islands.

The tokens in question are HLG, issued by Holograph Foundation. The defendant, a former employee of the company, illegally minted one billion HLG tokens by tampering with the minting parameters on the platform and then transferred them to wallets under his control. Prosecutors noted that the tokens were valued at approximately $14 million (€12.5 million) at the time. The court convicted him of charges including sabotaging automated data processing systems, organized fraud, money laundering, and participating in a criminal organization.

Two co-defendants received sentences of an €80,000 fine combined with two years in prison (14 months suspended), and an €40,000 fine with two years of probation, respectively. The court also dismissed a civil compensation claim filed by Holograph Foundation over the subsequent collapse in the token's price, ruling that the value had already plummeted prior to the incident, making it impossible to establish a direct causal link between the depreciation and the fraud. Prosecutors had previously requested a five-year prison term and an €800,000 fine for the main suspect.