“It was supposed to be a two-day trip.”
It wasn’t.
On Tuesday, Tigran Gambaryan, a onetime federal agent and the head of Binance’s financial crimes unit, shared an account of his eight-month ordeal in Nigeria’s legal system.
Locked up on charges he engaged in money laundering, Gambaryan suffered from malaria, pneumonia, and a herniated disc in his back. At one point he was so ill he collapsed in a courtroom in Abuja, the African nation’s capital.
“I almost died twice,” he told his audience at Chainalysis’ Links 2025 conference in New York.
Humour and stoicismNow, almost six months after
his release, Gambaryan recounted the Kafkaesque nightmare with a mix of humour and stoicism.
Just two days after arriving in Abuja last February to talk to Nigerian officials about allegations Binance was operating in the nation illegally, Gambaryan and his colleague, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were detained in a government “guest house.”
There was barbed wire all around the residence, except at the five-foot fence in the front, which led onto a city street.
“It was kind of a ridiculous situation,” he said. “It would have been as easy as just hopping a fence and getting an Uber.
“They had military guards that were stationed at the front of the gate, but they were always asleep,” he continued to laughs from the audience.
As it happened, Anjarwalla
didn’t stay long.
‘I thought he was just having another panic attack.’— Tigran Gambaryan, Binance
On March 22, 2024, Anjarwalla, a British lawyer who was Binance’s regional manager based in Nairobi, asked his guards to allow him to attend a prayer service at a mosque in observance of Ramadan.
In Gambaryan’s telling, Anjarwalla returned from the mosque and said he’d go upstairs to sleep.
Dark houseGambaryan spent the day on the phone with US officials. At night, he decided to check on his colleague.
The house was dark, Gambaryan recalled, because the staff were embezzling money meant to pay for the electricity.
In Anjarwalla’s upstairs bedroom, Gambaryan found one of his colleague’s feet poking out from under the bedsheets.
“He had a panic attack earlier in the month, so I thought he was just having another panic attack, and that’s why he had the blankets over him,” Gambaryan said.
He tugged on the blanket, only to find pillows and a water bottle stuffed in Anjarwalla’s sock. His colleague had made a dummy of himself.
While Anjarwalla had surrendered his Kenyan passport, he apparently kept his British passport hidden from Nigerian authorities. This is what he used to make his getaway. He made his way to the airport, where he boarded a flight for Kenya before the cops could catch up with him.
“I would have appreciated a heads up,” Gambaryan joked.
While Nigeria arranged an interpol Red Notice for Anjarwalla —
which is still in effect — Gambaryan was left to bear the brunt of Nigerian authorities’ wrath.
A pawnFrom the outset, it seemed clear that Gambaryan was a pawn in a larger conflict between Binance and the Nigerian central bank, as well as authorities in the nation’s anti-corruption and economic ministries.
They blamed the world’s largest crypto exchange for destabilising its fiat currency, the naira, which lost more than 90% of its value in early 2024.
‘Anybody who knows me or my prior job knows how ridiculous that is.’— Tigran Gambaryan, Binance
Last week, Alhaji Mohammed Idris, the government’s Minister of Information, told DL News that investigators had also found evidence Binance was
laundering illicit crypto transactions for terrorists and kidnappers.
“We stumbled on evidence linking the operations of Binance and these criminal elements ― terrorists and their like,” the minister said in an exclusive interview.
In his talk, Gambaryan, 40, described how he used to be an agent with the Internal Revenue Service and then put his skills to use at Binance by helping foreign governments contend with crypto fraud.
To be charged with being complicit in the very crimes he’d spent his career exposing was shocking, he said.
“Anybody who knows me or my prior job knows how ridiculous that is,” he said, “or where my residence is — I never earned any money in Nigeria.”
Charged in connection with an alleged $35 million money laundering scheme, Gambaryan was transferred to Kuje Prison, a facility that also housed terrorists and violent convicts. He was jailed in an underground cell.
“Imagine the worst place possible,” Gambaryan said. “No running water, no air conditioning, no showers.”
US lawmakers visitHe
contracted malaria and developed double pneumonia. He spent so much time laid out on a metal bed frame, he developed debilitating back pain.
After appearing in court in a wheelchair, Nigerian authorities instructed guards to make sure he made his next appearance on his own two feet.
He said authorities barred his lawyers from helping him get to the courtroom.
“If you watch the video, I try to reach out to one of the guards,” Gambaryan recounted. “He pulled his arm away because they were instructed not to help me out.”
“By them trying to make it seem like I’m doing okay, they actually made the situation worse.”
After media accounts reported on Gambaryan’s alarming condition — DL News
broke the news of Gambaryan’s and Anjarwalla’s detainment and
covered the case in detail — US lawmakers took notice.
In June, two members of Congress
visited Gambaryan in prison and were dismayed by his deteriorating health.
Pressed for actionThat same month, Yuki Gambaryan, Tigran’s wife, told DL News that she had expected more from Washington.
“I am shocked at how long it took for us to get to this point,” she told DL News in an exclusive video interview.
“It feels like the US government just got to the starting line now, which should have happened a long time ago.”
By September, the Biden administration had begun leaning on Abuja to release Gambaryan. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, buttonholed a senior Nigerian official that month in New York and
pressed him for action.
The next month, Nigerian prosecutors
dropped the charges and released Gambaryan. He was on a plane home that night.
Asked to reflect on the implications of his ordeal, Gambaryan said Tuesday that Nigeria had turned down a potential revenue source — its growing crypto industry — for a scored-earth campaign that had diminished the country in foreign investors’ eyes.
$81 billion billIndeed, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, was once a vibrant crypto market. Now stablecoin use has
plunged 38% in the last year as the government cracks down on the industry.
“They’re stuck with it now. It’s almost like they have to continue with this,” Gambaryan said.
“Nobody’s gonna go back and do any business there. The last time they gave guarantees, look what happened.”
As for Binance, it is still confronting three separate legal actions in Nigeria, including the tax ministry’s demand it pay a staggering
$81 billion penaltyl for lost economic activity.
The exchange has pleaded not guilty in the matters as trials loom.
