More than 300 accounts connected to illegal foreign exchange (FX) transactions have been suspended by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
The EFCC’s chairman, Ola Olukoyede, stated in a speech in Abuja on Tuesday that the organization had obtained a court order to freeze the accounts.
Imagine what would have occurred if we hadn’t seized those accounts—we had an order to freeze them, he said.
“People in this country are not doing as well as Binance,” he remarked.
Olukoyede claimed that in the previous year, nearly $15 billion went through one of the sites that was unregulated by financial authorities.
The event occurred one day after Nadeem Anjarwalla, the regional manager for Africa for Binance, was purportedly taken into custody by Kenyan authorities.
Anjarwalla and his colleague Tigran Gambaryan were being held by the federal government in an Abuja guest house until their escape on March 22.
After being brought by security to a neighboring mosque for Ramadan prayers, Anjarwalla is reported to have fled.
The federal authorities accused Anjarwalla and Gambaryan of tax evasion and money laundering. Both of them were taken into custody on February 28.
The governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Olayemi Cardoso, stated on February 27, 2024, that $26 billion came through Binance Nigeria in a single year from anonymous sources.
In order to combat illicit money flows, Cardoso stated that the apex bank was working with other organizations, such as the EFCC, the police, and the office of the national security adviser (NSA).
