Binance and Nigeria

News broke a few days ago about Nigerian officials allegedly demanding bribes of $150m from Binance earlier this year. Here’s how The New York Times reported it:

On a trip to Nigeria in January, Tigran Gambaryan, a compliance officer for the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, received an unsettling message: The company had 48 hours to make a payment of roughly $150 million in crypto.

Mr. Gambaryan, a former U.S. 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.

Before that, I spoke to The Record, an American media organisation who have been investigating the story, and gave my perspective on how and why things got to where they are now. You can read the story - which includes a link to the podcast - here.

Binance just facilitates those trades, it doesn’t control them. But it has angered Nigeria’s central bank nevertheless. According to Feyi Fawehinmi, a Nigerian scholar who has been writing about the nation’s  economic and political affairs for more than a decade, it was easy to blame Binance for economic problems. 

“People who wanted simple answers simply turned on them and said, Oh, OK, this economy is struggling. Nobody has dollars, who’s fault is this?” he said. “The dollar rate has jumped so significantly and the central bank had no control, so Binance became a kind of scapegoat.”

Central bankers didn’t want to blame the people trading naira, so they blamed the Binance platform instead. “These are unpopular people, right?” he said. “Nobody likes Binance. The US government doesn't like them. The U.K. government doesn't like them. Everyone is suspicious of them as a crypto platform across the world so someone in the government made the calculation that if we go after these people, nobody's going to really fight for them.”

They also did another podcast episode which used more of my recording with them. Link here.

Hope you find them illuminating.