Binance’s head of financial crime compliance, Tigran Gambaryan, appeared before a federal high court in Nigeria, where he is facing tax evasion charges.
For anyone working in the booming field of crypto tracing, which includes everyone from law enforcement officials to analytics firms like Chainalysis and TRM Labs, Gambaryan is a star. He helped pioneer the field during his time as a U.S. special agent at the Internal Revenue Service, working on prominent cases such as the takedown of Silk Road and the Welcome to Video child pornography platform.
According to Fortune, for the past month, he has been detained by Nigerian authorities, held as a de facto hostage in the government’s dispute with Binance.
Gambaryan’s conditions have deteriorated since the incident, according to a spokesperson for his family, though she cautioned that an aggravated situation likely would’ve happened regardless of Anjarwalla’s escape.
According to fortune, Gambaryan can no longer communicate with friends and family with his phone, and he has been moved from the guard house to a detention facility, which the spokesperson described as a cell. There is fear that Gambaryan could be moved to a prison, where his safety would be at even greater risk. “That escalation is very prevalent,” she said.
Leo Schwartz who works for Fortune said that it has become clear over the past month that Gambaryan and Anjarwalla are pawns in the Nigerian government’s efforts to extract a massive fine from Binance, with authorities accusing the exchange of moving $26 billion illegally out of the country in 2023. One official suggested that a penalty on the platform could be as high as $10 billion, which would be more than double the recent settlement with the U.S. government.
Whether Binance is guilty of tax evasion or currency manipulation is a separate matter—the pressing question here is whether Gambaryan is being held captive as a bargaining chip. According to a statement shared by a Binance spokesperson, who declined to comment further, Gambaryan’s team has responded to more than 600 information requests coming from Nigerian law enforcement agencies and provided multiple training sessions for Nigerian law enforcement officials. He also has “no decision-making power in the company,” according to the statement. Gambaryan’s imprisonment reflects a worrying trend of “hostage-taking laws,” where workers from companies can be held prisoners as leverage.