The Presidency has given reasons why some Executives of a cryptocurrency trading platform, Binance Nigeria, are arrested and being quizzed by security agencies
Speaking on the ‘Politics Today’ programme in Channels Television on Wednesday, President Bola Tinubu’s spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, alleged that the cryptocurrency trading platform was involved in some foreign exchange (FX) transactions abuses that if left unchecked would have destroyed the nation’s financial system.
Specifically, the President’s aide alleged that Binance was arbitrarily fixing the FX rate for the Naira, thereby accentuating the volatility in the FX market as well as the lingering depreciation of the local currency’s exchange rate.
He clarified: “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate. We have saboteurs. Look at what Binance is doing to our economy.
“That is why the government moved against Binance. Some people sit down using the cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN.
“They just sit down and fix anything they like. It’s a sabotage and we are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth”, Onanuga added.
While urging Nigerians to stop patronising the black market for foreign exchange and source their FX needs from the official window, he maintained that the parallel market remained not the real gauge to assess Nigeria’s economic health.
The President’s spokesman 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”, he added.
