Just one day after Binance announced it was deactivating the accounts of its major clients in Russia in order to comply with EU sanctions, Reuters reveals how, starting from April 2021, the world’s leading crypto exchange secretly shared client data with the Russian authorities.
At the time, Russia’s financial intelligence unit Rosfinmonitoring (Rosfin) was “seeking to trace millions of dollars in bitcoin raised by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny,” writes Reuters.
The Navaly team said the donations were used to finance their effort to expose corruption inside the Russian government. But the Russian authorities considered Navalny’s network as a “terrorist organization,” justifying Rosfinmonitoring’s investigation.
Reuters refers to “messages” showing that Binance’s head of Eastern Europe and Russia, Gleb Kostarev, “consented to Rosfin’s request to agree to share client data.”
Binance denied it had ever been contacted by Russian authorities regarding Navalny. The crypto exchange told Reuters that it was “actively seeking compliance in Russia” before the war.
But the new agency believes Kostarev’s exchange with Rosfin was “part of behind-the-scenes efforts by Binance to build ties with Russian government agencies as it sought to boost its growing business in the country.”
Reuters: Binance built ties to a Russian FSB-linked agencyRead More
