Tether held Chinese equities in the reserves backing its stablecoin USDT in 2021. The New York Attorney General revealed this through the documents provided by Tether. It was a part of Tether’s settlement in 2021.
Tether decided not to oppose the requests and to disclose the information. The NYAG, under the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), approved CoinDesk’s request and provided the documents on June 15.
Documents Include letters, bank accounts, reserve holdings, wallet addresses, and procedures for detecting money laundering.
They also provide details of the holdings as of March 31, 2021.
Tether was ordered to declare its reserves every three months for two years as part of the settlement it reached with the NYAG in 2021.
Tether fulfilled a two-year obligation on June 15.
Tether stated that it first rejected the FOIL requests out of concern about the privacy of its customers. Tether later decided to withdraw the request to be more open with the cryptocurrency community.
Tether urged the media to refrain from publishing customer information.
The corporation also published a thorough blog in which it addressed many of the issues due to media and the reasons for some of its earlier actions.
The documents reveal that Tether held securities issued by important state-owned companies in China. Tether held securities of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp., and Agricultural Bank of China Ltd.
Along with other significant European lenders, Tether also held assets issued by Barclays and Deutsche Bank.
According to the documents, the majority of Chinese securities were due for maturity in 2020 and 2021.
The documents verify Tether’s claim in its blog post that the banks issued the majority of the Chinese commercial paper it owned.
The company further claimed that many of the biggest investment managers in the world own such assets as a standard practice.
Tether stated that it has lowered its total exposure to commercial papers to zero and no longer holds any Chinese assets in the USDT reserves.
