Two of Binance’s senior executives are allegedly still being held in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, even after the company announced last week that it was leaving the country.According to a March 12 Wired story, two executives from Binance, Tigran Gambaryan, a former federal agent from the United States specializing in cryptocurrencies, and Nadeem Anjarwalla, another executive, had been detained in Abuja for two weeks without passports.Since February 26, 2024, Anjarwalla, the regional manager for Africa based in Kenya and Gambaryan, the head of Binance’s criminal investigations team, have been held at a government facility.
According to Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s families, Nigerian prosecutors have not provided information on whether the two face criminal charges.
“There’s no definite answer for anything: how he’s doing, what’s going to happen to him, when he’s coming back,” Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki Gambaryan, reportedly said.
A spokesperson for Binance confirmed to Cointelegraph that Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were still detained in Nigeria as of March 12, stating,“While it is inappropriate for us to comment on the substance of the claims at this time, we can say that we are working collaboratively with Nigerian authorities to bring Nadeem and Tigran back home safely to their families.”
The Binance spokesman emphasized that the exchange is sure that this issue will be resolved quickly and that both executives are “professionals with the highest integrity.”
The Financial Times reported on the detentions without naming Gambaryan and Anjarwalla on February 28, following the initial reports that appeared in late February.Their family claim that on February 25, Gambaryan, an American citizen, and Anjarwalla, a dual citizen of Kenya and the United Kingdom, landed in Abuja.Following an invitation from the Nigerian authorities to discuss Binance’s purportedly illegal activities in Nigeria, the executives traveled to Nigeria.
The following day, the executives allegedly met with Nigerian officials with the intention of talking about the government’s directive to the nation’s telecom carriers to obstruct access to Binance and other cryptocurrency exchanges.The authorities accused cryptocurrency exchanges of facilitating “illicit flows” of money and depreciating the naira, Nigeria’s official currency.However, rather than coming to an agreement on the disagreement, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s families claim that shortly after the initial meeting, they were brought to their hotels, told to gather their belongings, and transferred to a “guesthouse” maintained by Nigeria’s National Security Agency.It is said that when authorities confiscated their passports, they detained the two guys against their will at the house.
A U.S. State Department official has reportedly visited Gambaryan, and a U.K. Foreign Office officer has visited Anjarwalla, according to Wired.Guards from the Nigerian government have continued to attend those sessions, preventing them from having private conversations.The two individuals, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla, were taken into custody just days before to Binance’s formal declaration of its withdrawal from Nigeria on March 5.The company’s exit plan states that on March 8th, Binance stopped accepting naira withdrawals, and on March 7th, it eliminated all trading pairs that included the naira. Peer-to-peer trading with naira was also previously suspended by the site in late February.