Nov 24 (Reuters) - Lawyers for former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao are urging a U.S. judge to reject the Justice Department’s request to bar him from returning to his home in the United Arab Emirates until he is sentenced for violating anti-money laundering requirements.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P
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    1 year ago

    U.S. authorities said Binance broke U.S. anti-money laundering and sanctions laws and failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions with organizations the U.S. described as terrorist groups including Hamas, al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

    Never gets old

    • answersplease77@lemmy.world
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      They handed them hefty fines but I doubt they let CZ serve time in jail unless the recieving account was just ISIS Hodling Company and they kept business going

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.one
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    Yeah there’s no reason why they should let him.

    The UAE will shield him from extradition if he is allowed to return home because he is rich.

    He is the very definition of “Flight Risk” because he has:

    • Means - UAE will support him if he seeks asylum and/or legal aid. Binance is not based in the USA; so it cannot be dissolved by a US court finding. It will likely not fire him because of these charges, due to the nature of cryptocurrency.

    • Motive - The USA will not be able to quickly extradite him if he flees, and fleeing is in his interest to avoid being charged or jailed and ensure he keeps his job.

    • Money - He still has lots of money. Unlike SBF; he wasn’t suddenly bankrupted by Binance failing. Binance still exists and will continue to do so Without the USA allowing it to do business in it’s borders!

  • Red_October@lemmy.world
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    He’s playing 4d chess here, see by ASKING to be allowed to leave, he makes it clear that he won’t flee the country unless he gets permission, so there won’t be any reason to try to prevent it! /s

  • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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    I am actually surprised China is letting this happen. They must be pissed with this dude.

    He really did burn all his friends with one ego tweet to Sam Bankman.

      • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Of course.

        Basically, Sam Bankman fried and this CEO of binance got into an public ego match on twitter.

        As Sam was the owner of FTX, and Binance was the Chinese version of that.

        he tweeted:

        It seems $15m not only changed @kevinolearytv’s mind about crypto, it also made him align with a fraudster. Is he seriously defending SBF?

        https://youtu.be/pIXq1pfvG0g (baseless attacks start around 4:20).

        Which one domino crashed into another. FTX was found to be playing with clients funds and insolvent, and binance was turned inside out in the same process. Sam ended up with a 105 year sentence, and the Binance CEO is here.

  • Should be pretty easy to get him back, right? The US has reasonably good relations with UAE, and could confirm in advance that they’d extradite. Sure, maybe he cpuld more easily disappear into some other country; freeze all his accounts? And when they do get him back, he’d be going away for longer.

    I dunno. He’s a crook, but it’s not like he’s some truly horrible villain, like Trump.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      Not really. A) it’d be blatantly showing him a favoritism that we don’t ever show, and B) the UAE is friendly, yes, but they’re friendly like the House of Saud is friendly: on board with us, close allies, funded terror acts against us. It’s better to think of the UAE as resentful vassals than it is to think of them as full allies in the way we think of like Canada and Australia. Canada and Australia will willingly bear burdens for us and would probably see this as us doing them a favor had we done it for one of their citizens. For the UAE, it’s not like that, it’s a pretty big burden to place on them and they haven’t requested it given that it’s their citizen. Add in that these are pretty serious crimes and we’d be letting him go somewhere where he’d be able to easily slip away it’d be pretty stupid.