The ruling on a bail application filed by Tigran Gambaryan, an executive of Binance Holdings Limited has been stalled at the Federal High Court in Abuja due to the absence of Justice Emeka Nwite.
The matter, which was fixed for ruling on Gambaryan’s bail request, could not proceed as Justice Nwite was said to have gone for the ongoing seminar at the National Judicial Institute (NJI), Abuja.
The ruling was subsequently fixed for Oct 11.
On May 17, the court refused Gambaryan’s first bail request. The Binance executive later collapsed in court due to “ill-health”.
Counsel to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ekele Iheanacho, SAN, argued that the Binance executive was being given the best medical treatment by the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), alleged that Gambaryan, at one time, rejected the medical intervention by the State House Clinic in Abuja.
Ekele Iheanacho, EFCC counsel, said he has perused the defendant’s medical records and his health challenge “is not as serious” as it has been portrayed.
Meanwhile in the United States, the US government has established legal ownership of a massive sum of bit coins – identified by the IRS as stolen proceeds of the Silk Road dark-web drug market. The value of the sum of bit coins has grown to a staggering $4.4 billion dollars.
Ironically, Tigran Gambaryan was the IRS criminal investigator who traced and seized that record-breaking sum of cryptocurrency.
According to WIRED, In 2021, Gambaryan left the IRS to take a job as the head of investigations at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange—a move seen widely as driven by Binance’s belated attempt to clean up its own widespread use for money laundering, which led the company to pay a $4.3 billion criminal fine to the US government last year. When Nigeria followed that fine by accusing Binance of similar criminal misconduct and devaluing the country’s national currency, it was Gambaryan who was invited to Abuja to negotiate with the Nigerian government earlier this year. Instead, the Nigerian government detained Gambaryan, took his passport, and has now jailed him for over six months, charging him with money laundering and tax evasion as a proxy for his employer.
