The government of Nigeria has fined crypto exchange giant Binance $10 billion in an attempt to salvage the value of naira, the nation’s local currency.
This was disclosed on Friday by Bayo Onanuga, special adviser on information and strategy to President Bola Tinubu, in an interview with the BBC.
Recall that Nigerian authorities on Wednesday detained two senior executives at Binance as part of a crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges.
These executives had flown to Nigeria after the country banned several cryptocurrency trading websites last week, but upon arrival, they were detained by the office of the country’s national security adviser (NSA), and their passports were seized.
This was after Dr. Olayemi Cardoso, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), revealed that approximately $26 billion had been moved through Binance Nigeria by unknown sources in just one year.
Cardoso disclosed this information to journalists after a committee meeting held at the CBN headquarters in Abuja on Tuesday.
But speaking in an interview on Friday, Onanuga said Binance profited substantially from its “illegal transactions” in Nigeria while the nation suffered huge losses.
Onanuga asserted that Binance is not registered in Nigeria and does not operate within the country. He alleged that individuals utilized the platform to manipulate dollar-naira exchange rates, which adversely affected the local currency’s value.
Additionally, he clarified that the Binance team was actively cooperating with the Nigerian government by furnishing pertinent information and had already halted naira-related transactions on the platform.
Despite this, Nigeria is seeking reparation from Binance, aiming for a payment of at least $10 billion, Onanuga said.
Earlier in the week, Mr. Onanuga claimed that if left unchecked, the cryptocurrency trading platform would undermine the Nigerian economy by manipulating foreign exchange rates arbitrarily.
“If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate,” the presidential spokesman said on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Wednesday.