Corruption at Binance? A former executive of the European branch of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world claims to have been fired after raising allegations of internal corruption.
Binance singled out by a former executive
The European unit of Binance, the global cryptocurrency giant, is at the center of a new controversy. Amrita Srivastava, a former company executive, filed a lawsuit against Binance Europe after she was fired, she said, for reporting alleged corruption.
The information, revealed by Bloomberg, tells us that Amrita Srivastava was fired in May 2023, just one month after alerting her superiors to a case of corruption. According to his statements, a former colleague allegedly accepted money to accelerate the integration of a client on the platform, under the pretext of “ advisory services », via the Binance Link platform.
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The person concerned explained that she had been made aware of this act of corruption by a client based in the United Kingdom. He would have confirmed having paid a sum of money to benefit from preferential treatment. “ I wasn't ready to look away when a team member had scammed a customer. Some things are clearly right or wrong, and asking for a bribe or defrauding a customer is definitely wrong “, she declared in her testimony.
The Binance employee who allegedly received this bribe has reportedly left the company since the incident. For its part, the largest cryptocurrency exchange claims that the former executive would have been fired for “ poor performance », and that the problem raised by the latter was already the subject of an internal investigation before she reported the information.
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“A chaotic environment”
The former executive joined Binance in April 2022 after working at Mastercard, where she led fintech services for Western Europe. According to Bloomberg, she said that she believed then that the company had a sincere desire to remedy its compliance problems, but that the other side of the story was quite different.
In her statements to a British court, Amrita Srivastava described a working environment ” chaotic » where teams were under heavy pressure to make deals, due to a “ loss of earnings » in Binance Link revenue.
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This deficit was allegedly caused by the identification of a client linked to Iran, which accounted for about a quarter of the unit's revenue. This revelation has put Binance in a delicate position, as it comes against a backdrop where the company is accused of processing nearly $8 billion in transactions with Iranian users, in violation of US sanctions.
“ My experience at Binance was personally damaging to my career, an impact I will need to continue to correct over the coming years », Confided Amrita Srivastava in her testimony.
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Source: Bloomberg
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