The federal government of Nigeria has arrested and detained two executives of the Binance crypto exchange platform amid efforts to stabilise the nation’s foreign exchange market.
The officials, whose identities are yet to be made public, were arrested, detained, and their passports seized by the Nigerian government.
DAILY GIST recalls that Binance was recently banned in Nigeria to avert the continuous manipulation of the forex market and illicit movement of funds.
Apart from Binance, other platforms such as Forextime, OctaFX, Crypto, FXTM, Coinbase, Kraken, among others, were equally blocked.
The federal government decided to move against Binance and other crypto firms following reports that currency speculators and money launderers were using them to execute criminal activities.
Authorities believe the ‘criminal activities’ going on the platforms are contributing significantly to the weakening of the naira.
Binance, a digital assets platform, serves as a window for peer-to-peer transactions, allowing users to advertise interest to sell or buy currencies of their choice.
Reacting, Binance said “users behaving in a manipulative way” would be removed from its platform.
The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Yemi Cardoso, on Tuesday had said over $26 billion flowed through Binance Nigeria over the past year from “unidentified sources”.
Cardoso noted that the origins and beneficiaries of these funds are yet to be adequately identified.
However, according to PREMIUM TIMES, the two executives of Binance arrived in Nigeria on Sunday to negotiate with the Nigerian government amid the crackdown.
On Monday afternoon, the executives met with top cyber security officials and other investigators from the office of the National Security Adviser to discuss the various areas of contention.
However, the meetings were deadlocked as Binance officials declined to meet some of the demands put forward by the Nigerian government.
They were also accused of operating a business worth billions without the requisite registrations and documentation.
The newspaper sources revealed that the Nigerian authorities requested Binance executives to provide data relating to transactions involving the Nigerian Naira on the Binance platform in the last seven years.
They also demanded that some other data relating to Nigeria be deleted from the Binance platform.
However, the Binance executives insisted that they should be taken to their respective countries’ embassies before they could comply.
While the full identities of the two Binance executives remain sketchy, it was gathered that one of them is an American and the other a British-Pakistani.
The Nigerian government also obtained a court warrant to detain the officials for at least twelve days in the first instance.
The investigation was consequently taken over by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) while the two executives were detained at a guest house near the Office of the National Security Adviser.
Meanwhile, indications emerged Wednesday that Binance disabled its peer-to-peer function for Nigerian users on its platform.
More popularly known as P2P, the platform allows users, buyers and sellers to trade without third-party interference and became popular among Nigerians when the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari banned cryptocurrency in 2021.
With the disabling of the P2P platform for Nigerian users, it remains unclear whether Nigerians would still be able to trade on the Binance platform.
