Nigerian Government Hits Binance With $10bn Fine

The Nigerian government is demanding at least $10 billion as fine from Binance amid crackdown on the crypto exchange platform in desperate moves to salvage the value of the nation’s local currency.

Bayo Onanuga, special adviser on information and strategy to President Bola Tinubu, made this known Friday morning in an interview with the BBC.

Binance profited substantially from its “illegal transactions” in Nigeria while the nation suffered huge losses, Mr Onanuga said during the interview.

Mr Onanuga claimed that Binance is not registered in Nigeria and has no presence in the country. He alleged that people used the platform to arbitrarily fix dollar-naira rates; a practice he said negatively impacted the value of the local currency.

He explained further that the Binance team were already cooperating with the Nigerian government by providing useful information, and had already suspended naira related transactions on the platform.

Earlier in the week, Mr Onanuga had alleged that if not stopped, the cryptocurrency trading platform will destroy the Nigerian economy by arbitrarily fixing foreign exchange rate.

“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.

Binance, a digital assets platform, serves as a window for peer to peer transactions allowing users to advertise interest to sell or buy currencies of their choice.

In September 2023, Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) placed a disclaimer on Binance Nigeria Limited, saying the platform was “neither registered nor regulated by the Commission and its operations in Nigeria are therefore illegal”.

In its reaction last week, Binance said “users behaving in a manipulative way” will be removed from its platform.