The 69-year-old director of the Alabama Securities Commission, in the job since 1994, looks more like a small-town lawyer with his trim, white mustache and boxy suits than an enforcer canny enough to outwit a brash new breed of billionaire tech moguls.
. “There’s a lot of money on the table, these are very complex cases, and it would be the job of the national regulator. I don’t know why the SEC isn’t out there in these areas right now.”SEC chair Gary Gensler rejects the notion that his agency hasn’t done enough. “We’ve worked well with the states,” Gensler said in a recent call with reporters. “I think the firms could have done a lot more to protect the public. I think the firms could do a lot more still to protect the public.
That was the case back in early 2014, when Borg’s office started fielding complaints from customers of a Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange called Mt. Gox who were having trouble getting their funds from the platform. Borg said he tried to reach the administrators of the exchange, at the time the largest of its kind in the world, and they did not respond. “Those are all red flags, especially when they don’t talk to regulators,” he said.Mt.
“That’s no different from a security,” Borg said. More ominously, with no regulators peering into the company’s books, it was not clear to whom the firm was lending, on what terms, and what collateral it held to back up customer deposits in the event it ran into trouble. BlockFi declined to comment for this story.Borg had seen it before. He first made his name as a regulator going after another financial juggernaut that recruited amateur investors with promises of outsize returns.