By Emmanuel Nduka
The Nigerian Government led by President Bola Tinubu have been accused of soliciting bribes to the tune of $150 million from global cryptocurrency giant Binance, the firm’s executive disclosed on Tuesday.
Tigran Gambaryan, a compliance officer for Binance recounted that on a trip to Nigeria in January, he received an unsettling message that the company had 48 hours to make a payment of roughly $150 million in crypto, the New York Times reports.
Binance Chief Executive Richard Teng said the Tinubu administration was keen on extracting the large sum from the company in order to make the recent fraud charges “go away” shortly after a meeting was held with Nigerian lawmakers.
“A significant payment in cryptocurrency to be paid in secret within 48 hours to make these issues go away,” Teng wrote in a blog post posted on Binance website Tuesday.
“The message from the Nigerian government is clear,” the Binance’s chief executive added. “We must detain an innocent, mid-level employee and a former US federal agent, and place him in a dangerous prison in order to control Binance.”
But it was not immediately clear whether or not lawmakers took part in demanding the alleged bribes.
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Heritage Times HT reports that Binance first disclosed the amount of the bribes to the New York Times.
Gambaryan who is a former US law enforcement agent, understood the message as a request for a bribe from someone in the Nigerian government, according to five people familiar with the matter and messages reviewed by the New York Times.
He and a group of his Binance colleagues had just met with Nigerian legislators, who accused the company of tax violations and threatened to arrest its employees.
Out of fear, the Binance officials fled Nigeria in a panic.
Later that month, Gambaryan wrote a three-page report describing the payment request and gave it to Binance’s lawyers, two people familiar with the report said. He also alerted contacts in the Nigerian government, the people said, and recounted the incident to them.
The episode was the backdrop for a second trip to Nigeria that Mr. Gambaryan took in February. On his return, he and a colleague, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were arrested by the Nigerian authorities, setting off a crisis at Binance.
The embattled Gambaryan has been held in Kuje prison in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, for the last four weeks, after he was transferred there from a government compound on April 8.
His case is the latest legal headache for Binance, which agreed to a $4.3 billion fine last year to settle charges by the U.S. government that it allowed criminal activity to flourish on its platform.
It would be recalled that recently in April, the company’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, was sentenced to four months in prison for his role in those violations.
The Nigerian Government have charged both Binance and Gambaryan with tax evasion and money laundering. Binance has denied that Mr. Gambaryan had any “decision-making power” in the company.
