<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



A Binance executive detained in Nigeria last month escaped from custody over the weekend, as the West African country filed charges of tax evasion against the cryptocurrency exchange and some of its executives in the latest public scandal for the firm.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



Binance executives Tigran Gambaryan, a U.S. citizen, and Nadeem Anjarwalla, British-Kenyan citizen, were both taken into custody in Nigeria in February but not charged with any crimes until Monday.



The executives and the crypto company were charged with alleged non-payment of value-added tax (VAT) and company income tax, failure to file tax returns, and complicity in assisting customers to evade taxes through its platform, Nigeria’s Federal Inland Revenue Service announced Monday, according to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-25/nigeria-announces-charges-against-binance-after-executive-flees" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">multiple</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/binance-executive-escapes-nigerian-custody-as-authorities-file-new-tax-charges.html" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">outlets</a>.



The charges come days after Anjarwalla reportedly escaped from where he was being detained after guards watching him took him to a nearby mosque for prayers, The Premium Times, a Nigerian news outlet,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-news/680617-nigerian-govt-confirms-escape-of-binance-executive-arrests-personnel-guarding-him.html" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">reported</a>.



Nigeria is in talks with Interpol to get an international arrest warrant for Anjarwalla, Nigeria’s national security adviser&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/nigeria-files-tax-evasion-charges-against-binance-tax-agency-says-2024-03-25/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">told</a>&nbsp;Reuters.



Binance confirmed Anjarwalla was no longer in Nigerian custody.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-crucial-quote">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



“Our primary focus remains on the safety of our employees and we are working collaboratively with Nigerian authorities to quickly resolve this issue,” Binance told Forbes in an email.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Gambaryan and Anjarwalla have been in Nigeria since Feb. 26 when they&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/binance-executives-remain-detention-after-nigeria-court-appearance-families-say-2024-03-20/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">reportedly</a>&nbsp;arrived to discuss the country’s decision to ban some cryptocurrency trading websites, including Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. The office of the National Security Adviser in Nigeria detained the pair and seized their passports,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1507509b-7bbc-48a1-9828-d777036fff2b" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">according to</a>&nbsp;the Financial Times. Both of their families have since&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/binance-executives-remain-detention-after-nigeria-court-appearance-families-say-2024-03-20/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">pleaded</a>&nbsp;with authorities to release the executives. Ahead of their detention, Olayemi Cardoso, Nigeria’s central bank governor,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1507509b-7bbc-48a1-9828-d777036fff2b" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">told</a>&nbsp;reporters in February officials were concerned about “illicit flows” going through a number of crypto platforms, according to the Financial Times. He went on to say that in one year, $26 billion passed through Binance Nigeria “from sources and users who we cannot adequately identify.” Days later, the Binance executives were detained. The concerns about crypto trading come as Nigeria struggled with currency devaluation. In the past year, the value of the Nigerian currency, the naira, has fallen 70%&nbsp;<a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/currency/ngnusd" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">against</a>&nbsp;the U.S. dollar.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tangent">TANGENT</h2>



The tax evasion charges and detentions follow high-profile problems Binance has faced in recent years. In November, Changpeng Zhao, the company’s founder, pleaded guilty to Justice Department charges of breaking anti-money laundering laws and violating sanctions and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/02/23/judge-approves-binances-43-billion-settlement-for-anti-money-laundering-sanctions-violations/?sh=9d34b8d44758">agreed</a> to pay more than $4.3 million in fines and restitutions for doing so. In June, the Securities and Exchange Commision <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/06/05/sec-sues-binance-for-multiple-us-rule-violations/?sh=74a7467d7fcb">sued</a> Binance for operating an illegal exchange in the U.S. Months before that, in March, regulators <a href="https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8680-23" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">alleged</a> that Binance and Zhao evaded Commodity Futures Trading Commission rules. The crypto company <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-06/us-probes-binance-over-token-that-is-now-world-s-fifth-largest" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly</a> remains under investigation from the SEC over whether the company illegally sold digital coins when it started out in 2017. Binance isn’t alone: other crypto firms, including Beaxy and Kraken, have also been hit with civil lawsuits recently as regulators crack down on the industry.<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/"></a>

In this photo illustration, the Binance logo is displayed on

Binance Executive Flees Nigerian Prison Amid New Charges

In the world of cryptocurrency, where billion-dollar fortunes can be made overnight, speed is everything — and CZ is the fastest of them all. From closet-size offices in Tokyo — &#8220;I would touch four people if I turned around in a circle&#8221;— the 41-year-old Chinese-Canadian coder runs Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that has gone from a standing start to the largest on the planet in just under 180 days. CZ (born Changpeng Zhao) cut his teeth making high-frequency trading systems for Wall Street&#8217;s flash boys, and he built Binance to be a Ferrari. His exchange can process a blazing 1. 4 million transactions a second and on a peak trading day in January processed 3.5 billion new orders, cancels and trades. Speculators (some 25% of them from the U.S.) use Binance to trade 120 different coins, generating $200 million in profits for CZ&#8217;s exchange last quarter. BNB, the virtual coin CZ created in August that gives holders a 50% discount on trading fees, has a market cap of $1.3 billion. His stake in Binance and his coins give CZ a personal fortune worth as much as $2 billion.
He is hardly alone in becoming insanely and instantly rich from crypto. Chris Larsen, a longtime tech exec known for cofounding a string of fintech apps, saw his net worth flirt with $20 billion at the height of cryptomania in early January, based on his ownership of 5.2 billion XRP, the tokens of Ripple, the company he founded. XRP has since crashed 65%, but Larsen still tops Forbes&#8217; first crypto rich list, our (necessarily inexact) accounting of the 20 wealthiest people in crypto.
There are now nearly 1,500 crypto-assets in existence, valued at an aggregate of $550 billion, up 31 times since the beginning of 2017. While the prices of individual cryptocoins continue to swing wildly — Bitcoin is down almost 50% from its peak — it&#8217;s clear that blockchain-based currency is here to stay and that these virtual assets have real, albeit volatile and speculative, value. Black-market transactions, tax avoidance by individuals and sanctions-dodging by countries like North Korea fuel part of the demand, but so does a widespread excitement over the technology and an ideological desire for money to be free from the whimsies of nation-states.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/bitcoin-blockchain-billions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Bitcoin, Blockchain And Billions</a>
The winners of this digital lottery differ from those in previous manias. The shadowy beginnings, at once anarchistic, utopian and libertarian, drew an odd lot of pioneers who ranged from anti-establishment cypherpunks and electricity-guzzling &#8220;miners&#8221; to prescient Silicon Valley financiers and a larger-than-usual assortment of the just plain lucky &#8220;hodlers&#8221; (the typo-inspired crypto jargon for &#8220;buy and hold&#8221; investors). As in any gold rush, selling the pans and pickaxes &#8211; in this case running exchanges &#8211; is proving a more reliable path to riches than speculation. And, of course, easy money — especially if it&#8217;s viewed as a bearer asset — attracts scam artists and thieves.
Banking heir Matthew Mellon, whose $2 million investment in <a href="https://ripple.com/xrp/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">XRP</a> blossomed into some $1 billion, learned that firsthand in January. The morning after a big bash, the 54-year-old recent divorcé says he discovered four people rooting around his $150,000-a-month Los Angeles party pad. (He didn&#8217;t report it to the police.) The unwanted guests were probably after his XRP and they stole four laptops and two cellphones. They didn&#8217;t get Mellon&#8217;s crypto-fortune — anyone with enough assets to make our list long ago figured out how to secure it. (Sorry, thugs.) In Mellon&#8217;s case, the private keys are divided up and safely scattered in cold storage around the country in other people&#8217;s names. But the incident underscores the weirdness that separates cryptomania from bubbles past.
Identifying the biggest crypto winners and estimating the scale of their wealth is no simple task. The virtual currencies exist almost entirely outside the global financial system, and the newly minted crypto rich live in a strange milieu that blends paranoid secrecy with ostentatious display. Take CZ&#8217;s <a href="https://www.binance.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Binance</a> exchange. It has no real headquarters: Employees are scattered across several countries, and CZ himself seems to change locales the way others change clothes. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want to be in one place right now because of regulatory uncertainty,&#8221; says CZ. Last we heard, CZ and his trademark black hoodie had just popped up in Taiwan.
And CZ is downright normal by crypto-billionaire standards. Former child actor Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks, First Kid) dresses like a cut-rate Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and is given to making grandiose statements from the balcony of his penthouse in Santa Monica, California. &#8220;This is an opportunity to be a trillionaire &#8211; someone who is positively impacting a trillion living things on this planet,&#8221; he tells Forbes. Pierce once raised $60 million from Goldman Sachs with the help of Stephen Bannon, President Trump&#8217;s former chief strategist, to fund a company that sold virtual swords, chain mail and horses to role-playing videogamers. He also once got into trouble with his partners in a 1990s-era dot-com start-up after they were accused, in civil lawsuits, of sexual abuse of underaged boys. (Pierce has always denied the accusations and was never charged; one of his business partners, however, pleaded guilty to transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of sex.)
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/emperors-new-coins/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Emperor&#8217;s New Coins</a>
Pierce was early into the crypto game, first mining Bitcoin and then financing blockchain start-ups and investing in dozens of initial coin offerings. Although he publicly proclaims he is pledging a billion dollars to charity, he refuses to provide documentation that proves he has anywhere near that much money.
Given this opaqueness and crypto&#8217;s hyper-volatility, we are presenting our net-worth estimates in ranges. We based our numbers on estimated holdings of cryptocurrencies (a few provided proof), post-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and stakes in crypto-related businesses. We&#8217;ve also categorized our crypto rich list into five groups: idealists, builders, opportunists, infrastructure players and establishment investors. Many fit into more than one category.
It&#8217;s a near certainty that we&#8217;ve missed some people and that some of our estimates are wide of the mark. But this was equally true when we launched the first Forbes 400 list of America&#8217;s richest people in 1982. At the time, many people said we couldn&#8217;t — or shouldn&#8217;t — publish it. We did so anyway. And we firmly believe we made the world a better place by shining a light on the invisible rich. Just as crypto has evolved from the days of the Silk Road drug site and the Mt. Gox digital hijacking, fortunes of this magnitude should never be allowed to lurk in the shadows. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Jeff Kauflin</a>, FORBES STAFF
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/richest-in-cryptocurrency/#73d03dd11d49" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ THE FULL LIST OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN CRYPTOCURRENCY</a>

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Binance Executive Flees Nigerian Prison Amid New Charges

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