Mark Karpeles, the chief executive of the now defunct Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, has denied the embezzlement charges slapped against him in connection with the disappearance of millions of dollars’ worth of virtual currency and cash.

The 32-year-old French national filed a not guilty plea on Tuesday at the Tokyo District Court in response to charges of data manipulation and embezzling a total of JPY341 million (US$2.98 million) in customers’ money between September and December 2013, Nikkei Asian Review reported.

After listening to the charges against him, Karpeles read out a prepared statement in Japanese, saying, “I swear to God I am not guilty.”

Karpeles made international headlines in 2015, when he was arrested in Tokyo on charges of unlawfully extracting and using private electromagnetic records. Japanese authorities said the man accessed Mt. Gox’s U.S.-hosted trading platform in 2013 and altered the data in his personal account twice.