Nigerian authorities have asked the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance to pay a $10 billion fine for infractions, a spokesman for President Bola Tinubu said on Friday.
Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s media adviser, said Binance had enabled “illegal transactions” hurtful to the Nigerian economy.
During a BBC interview, Onanuga said Binance is not registered in Nigeria and has no presence in the country.
He alleged that Binance used its platform to arbitrarily fix dollar-naira rates, a practice he alleged negatively impacted the value of the local currency.
The Nigerian official earlier this week stated that a clampdown on Binance was unnegotiable if the Nigerian economy must be protected.
“If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate,” Onanuga said in a Channels TV interview.
Last week, Nigerian authorities blocked Binance’s website and other cryptocurrency platforms as part of a crackdown on currency speculators perceived to be responsible for the weakening of the Nigerian naira in the foreign exchange market.
Other platforms – Forextime, OctaFX, Crypto, FXTM, Coinbase, Kraken, among others – were also restricted by Nigerian authorities.
Binance thereafter claimed innocence of the claim by the Nigerian officials, saying digital currency trading on its platform has been in compliance with local regulations and laws.
The squabble between Nigeria and Binance reached a climax on Tuesday when Nigerian authorities arrested two senior executives of the cryptocurrency firm who were in the country for negotiations with the government. Sources disclosed that one of them is an American and the other a British-Pakistani.
The Guardian gathered earlier that the meetings were deadlocked as the Binance officials refused to meet some of the demands of the Nigerian government.
However, on Friday, Onanuga said the Binance team were already cooperating with the Nigerian government by providing useful information, and had already suspended naira-related transactions on the platform.
