Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent

For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been detained and then jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now, he may finally be coming home.

On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Gambaryan, a Binance executive who previously served as an IRS criminal investigator for a decade, will be dropped on medical grounds as pressure from the US government has grown to secure Gambaryan's release.

Gambaryan was detained in February and later jailed after being invited to the country by Nigerian officials to discuss a dispute between the Nigerian government and Binance over its history of money laundering and the exchange's alleged role in devaluing the Nigerian national currency. He's since been held in the country's Kuje prison, where, according to his family and his attorneys, he's suffered acutely from a herniated disc in his spine that requires immediate surgery.

Despite the Nigerian court's decision to drop the charges against Gambaryan, first reported by Bloomberg News, Gambaryan is still in Nigeria and was returned to jail after the ruling, according to Patrick Hillman, a former Binance executive and colleague of Gambaryan's who has been involved with the lobbying effort to free him. “We’re all kind of waiting right now to hear that he’s on a plane, airborne, and headed home,” Hillman says. “Until we have verification of that, we’re all just clutching our shirt collars and waiting to make sure there are no other hiccups.”

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