This week Tigran Gambaryan — the head of financial crime compliance for Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — found himself in the last place he’d ever expected to be: in a Nigerian courtroom pleading for bail.
A former investigator with the IRS, he’d spent more than a decade following illicit cryptocurrency transactions back to the people who made them. Rolling up, among others, the alleged founder of AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes, and Silk Road’s “Dread Pirate Roberts,” Ross Ulbricht.
But now, after a spectacularly bad turn of events, Gambaryan has found himself at the center of a battle between his company and regulators of the Nigerian government. A Nigerian court has charged him personally for a roster of alleged crimes that Binance is accused of committing, and it is unclear how a middle manager, a former cop, has ended up shouldering the blame. Gambaryan has pleaded not guilty. He says he’s done nothing wrong.
Even so, Nigerian authorities have held Gambaryan under guard since late February. Click Here spoke to more than a dozen current and former IRS and FBI agents who either knew Gambaryan well or had worked with him, and they all voiced the same concern: Why isn’t the government doing more for one of its own?
“You’re leaving a fellow law enforcement officer, even though he’s out of the game, kind of hanging,” said Matt Price, a former IRS agent who worked with Tigran on cases and at Binance. “We can’t believe they’re not doing anything.” And while his plight appears to have been elevated inside the Biden administration in recent days, agents are asking “what took them so long?”
“I have done nothing wrong,” Gambaryan said in a cell phone video he filmed back in March. “I’ve been a cop my whole life. I’m asking the United States government to assist me … I need your help guys. I don’t know if I’ll get out of this without your help. Please help.”
Charges after an escape
Gambaryan’s cell phone video summed in 40 seconds what is otherwise a very complicated series of events. “Hello my name is Tigran Gambaryan and I’m the head of financial crime compliance at Binance,” it began. “I have been detained by the Nigerian government for a month and I don’t know what is going to happen to me after today.”
While Gambaryan recorded the message, it was clear he was worried guards would stop him or grab his phone because just a few hours earlier he had awoken from a nap to learn that the Binance colleague who had been detained with him had somehow escaped. “I had nothing to do with it, I was not involved in any of it,” he said in the video.
Nadeem Anjarwalla was Binance’s regional manager in charge of Africa. He and Gambaryan were detained by the authorities at the same time. But the afternoon of that video, according to three people familiar with what happened, Gambaryan found a Post-it note from Anjarwalla that essentially said he was sorry, but he was making a break for it. Anjarwalla had put pillows under the covers of his bed so guards would think he was still there.
While it is unclear exactly how he got out of the government compound, it appears he asked guards if he could go to a nearby mosque to say prayers for Ramadan, and while he was in the mosque, he gave them the slip. It was left to Gamabaryan to break it to his captors that Anjarwalla was gone. The Nigerian government now claims that it is in negotiations with Kenya to have Anjarwalla extradited.
Their anger and embarrassment at having lost Binance’s country manager seems to have fallen mostly on Gambaryan. Within days of the escape, the Nigerian authorities charged him, Anjarwalla and Binance itself with tax evasion and money laundering.
The fact that Gambaryan found himself on the receiving end of all of this is particularly ironic because his job at Binance was to act as a liaison between law enforcement and the company and he came to…
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