The Federal Government has imposed a $10 billion fine on crypto trading platform, Binance, over allegations of influencing the country’s forex crisis.
Mr. Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy to President Bola Tinubu disclosed this early Friday during an interview with the BBC.
According to him, the cryptocurrency trading platform benefitted from its “illegal transactions” in Nigeria while the country suffered huge losses as a result of the abuses in the foreign exchange (FX) transactions.
The President’s aide, who pointed out that Binance was not legally registered in Nigeria and had no presence in the country, alleged that people used the platform to arbitrarily fix dollar-naira rates, thereby triggering consistent devaluation of the national currency (Naira) over the past months with the attendant negative impact on the nation’s economy.
Onanuga confirmed that the Binance team was already cooperating with the government in its ongoing investigations on the FX markets abuses by providing useful information and suspending Naira-based transactions on the platform.
He expatiated: “The platform fixes the exchange rate in Nigeria, which is illegal. The Central Bank of Nigeria is the only authority that can fix the exchange rate for Nigeria.
“Binance harbours a lot of people who fix exchange rates which impacted the country badly at a time when the government is trying to stabilize the economy”, Onanuga alleged.
This is even as he accused Binance of influencing the FX rates’ surge through currency speculations, thus causing the Naira to depreciate by almost 70% in the FX markets in recent months.
