About 100 former US federal prosecutors and agents are calling on the US State Department about Tigran Gambaryan, urging Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to work for his release.
The 39-year-old, a former US tax agent and compliance director at cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has been in detention in Nigeria since April 2024 on suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering. .
The reason is his employer’s tensions with the Nigerian state. The West African country accuses Binance, a very popular platform in Nigeria, of sabotaging its economic efforts by manipulating the exchange rates of the Naira, the local currency.
“Hostage of a foreign power”
“After almost a month of detention without any charges being brought against him, Tigran Gambaryan is now detained on false accusations”write the authors of the letter about this Atlanta resident arrested on February 28, 2024 in the company of his British citizen colleague Nadeem Anjarwalla, on the sidelines of a working visit to Abuja.
The latter has since escaped, fleeing using a smuggled passport, according to Nigerian authorities. The document denounces “the de facto holding hostage of a former American federal agent in deplorable conditions for nearly three months by a foreign power in order to force his employer to settle a matter that does not directly concern him”.
For the signatories, the efforts of the American government on the issue have been “insufficient”. They also warn against “the consequences of potentially serious prolonged inertia”.
The other side of the coin
This inquiry comes one day after that of sixteen American senators against the State Department and President Joe Biden, requesting the assignment of the file to the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs.
Enough to provoke the denial of the Nigerian Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris. The latter declared on June 5, 2024 to Bloomberg that “No one was detained in Nigeria outside the laws of the country.”
The case reflects both Binance’s successes and its setbacks. This platform, the world leader in digital currency exchange, comes up against the intransigence of certain countries in its efforts to make cryptocurrency a real alternative to traditional currencies. The company saw its founder Changpeng Zhao sentenced last May to four months in prison for money laundering in the United States.
