Two Binance executives — an American and a British- Pakistani — have been detained on the orders of National Security Adviser (NSA) Nuhu Ribadu over alleged involvement in foreign exchange manipulations.
Their names were not made available.
It was learnt last night that the Federal Government obtained a Court Warrant to detain the men for 12 days, pending further investigation by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
They were taken into custody at a Guest House operated by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA).
The duo allegedly flew into Nigeria yesterday following the Federal Government crackdown on Cryptocurrency exchange. The government plans to ban Cryptocurrency trading owing to alleged sharp practices through their websites.
Speaking on Tuesday after the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Dr. Olayemi Cardoso, claimed that billions of dollars had passed through the channel from unidentified sources.
The CBN boss said: “In the case of Binance, in the last one year alone, $26 billion passed through Binance Nigeria from sources and users who we cannot adequately identify.
“We are concerned that certain practices go on that indicate illicit flows going through a number of these entities and suspicious flows, at best.”
The NSA has asked Binance to provide the data on its operations in Nigeria in the past seven years.
The arrested executives declined a request to delete all Nigerian information from their platform, insisting that they would not do so until they are taken to their (countries’) embassies.
Also yesterday, the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, clarified reasons for the clampdown on Binance and other cryptocurrency trading websites.
He declared that failure to stop Binance will lead to the destruction of the economy.
He said: “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, it will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate,” he stated.
“We have saboteurs. Look at what Binance is doing to our economy. That is why the government moved against it. Some people sit down using cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN.
“They just sit down and fix anything they like. We are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth.”
He urged Nigerians to quit patronising the black market for foreign exchange rates, stating that the official website of the Central Bank is the only authorised source.
Arguing that the parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health but an illegal market, Onanuga said: “I don’t even know why Nigerians and the media are feeding on the parallel market. That is not where we should go; what’s the CBN rate? As at Friday, the rate for the dollar was about N1, 600.”
“Even in the so-called parallel market, the exchange rate is stabilising there and that is what this needs.”
On the dollarization of the economy, he said: “Importers are looking at the exchange rate and using it to fix prices, some of them arbitrarily, some of them actually profiteering.”
The presidential aide assured that the prices of goods in the nation would return to normal as soon as the top financial regulator stabilises the exchange rate.
“Things are not going to get worse, they are going to get better in the next few weeks,” he added.
