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.
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.
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.