Deltec Bank & Trust Chairman Says Tether Letter is Authentic Regarding USDT Relationship

The chairman of the Deltec Bank has recently affirmed that Tether’s account on the company is “authentic”. Tether has published an open letter on November 1 in which the company states that it had a $1.8 billion USD account in the bank to back all of its USDT tokens in circulation 1 for 1.

The main issue happened after the bank did not deny or confirm Tether’s allegation, which has caused some controversy. The main reason for the bank not speaking anything about the allegations was because it was legally bound not to talk about the accounts of the clients.

However, as the company made public the announcement, the chairman talked to them and revealed that it was the truth. The bank from the Bahamas has then announced to the media that the letter was legitimate.

Tether was always surrounded by controversies in early 2017 as Tether and Bitfinex both lost access to Taiwanese bank after Wells Fargo had cut off their banks from Taiwan due to their relationship with Tether. The Noble Bank, based in Puerto Rico, has also never confirmed their relationship with the company. This has led to some transparency issues that were very bad for Tether.

The lack of confidence from the company has led the price of the tokens to fall sharply in recent months as the market was not confident that Tether and Bitfinex were completely solvent.

Compliance Laws

The company has only affirmed that and nothing else mostly because of the compliance laws that the country currently has. The Bahamian law prevents banks from divulging any information about its clients to the public. This way, they would be sued even if Tether did not have a problem with the bank affirming that.

The compliance includes anti-money laundering laws and combating terrorism financing. The company has affirmed to be completely compliant with the banking regulators in the country and with international standards, as well as a set of internal policies that were created to respect the safety and risk management from the clients.

After stating this, the bank has also complained that it receives a lot of discrimination because it is set in the Bahamas instead of being in a bigger country because most people believe that banks in these countries are only used for money laundering and similar practices, which they deny to be the truth.

The chairman has also criticized the media coverage of the case as they are not able to talk about their clients and the whole media makes it look like they were denying that Tether was, indeed, a client.

Because of this, they confirmed that they only went public with the confirmation of the letter because Tether also went public with it, so they did not see this as an issue anymore.