In an interview with Wired’s Andy Greenberg, Tigran Gambaryan detailed his protracted legal issue in the hands of the Nigerian government.
The executive’s ordeal began on March 23, 2024, in Abuja, Nigeria, where he and his colleague at the cryptocurrency firm Binance, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were being held hostage in a Nigerian government-owned compound without access to their passports, under military guard, in a building circled by barbed-wire walls.
The talented financial sleuth was sent to Nigeria to resolve the West African nation’s disputes with the crypto exchange alongside other members of Binance’s team.
When Gambaryan joined Binance in the fall of 2021, it was already under investigation by the US Justice Department. Binance went for him so he could be a poster boy for the company’s transformation.
Unfortunately, it would take a lot more to wipe the exchange’s slate clean. In November 2023, US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that Binance had agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and forfeitures, one of the biggest corporate penalties in the history of US criminal justice.
The company’s founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, was also personally fined $150 million and later sentenced to four months in prison. That case declared open season for other countries to demand their pound of flesh. Cue the Nigerian government.
Tigran Gambaryan’s first shock in Nigeria
In December 2023, a committee in Nigeria’s National Assembly invited Binance executives to attend a hearing in its capital, Abuja, to explain how it planned to right its alleged wrongs.
Naturally, when Binance assembled its Nigerian delegation, its star investigator and former federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan, was part of it.
The whole effort started well. Gambaryan and the delegates arrived in Abuja in January of last year. Gambaryan had Olalekan Ogunjobi, a Nigerian detective with the EFCC as an aide when he first arrived in the country. And as a gesture of good faith, he shared some tips from his time with the IRS.
Ogunjobi had also read about Gambaryan’s career, and he mentioned his admiration for the Binance executive’s legendary record as a federal agent when they first met.
However, Gambaryan soon realized there was no resolution in sight despite the pleasantries. The officials wanted a payment of $150 million to make Binance’s issues in the country go away—to be paid in cryptocurrency, directly into officials’ crypto wallets—and it seemed like they wouldn’t let the group leave the country until it was paid.
It was a dilemma; If they gave the bribe, they’d be violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but if they refused, they could be detained indefinitely.
The team opted for a third option: Get the hell out of Nigeria immediately, and that was what they did.
He was tricked into returning to Nigeria
Not long after he arrived home to the suburbs of Atlanta, Gambaryan received a call from Ogunjobi who expressed dismay about the underhanded tactics the Binance executive reported.
He eventually set up a call between Gambaryan and Ahmad Sa’ad Abubakar, an official at the EFCC described as the right-hand man of Nigeria’s national security adviser, Nuhu Ribadu.
Ogunjobi told Gambaryan that Ribadu was inviting him to meet with him in person to resolve Binance’s problems in Nigeria and get to the bottom of the bribery attempt.
The only person who smelled fish was Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki, and she warned him not to go back.
In the early morning hours of February 25, Gambaryan, accompanied only by Nadeem Anjarwalla, the company’s regional manager for East Africa, a fresh-faced British-Kenyan Stanford grad with a baby son back in Nairobi, caught a flight back to Abuja, where Ogunjobi picked him.
Tigran Gambaryan’s trials in Nigeria
When Gambaryan and Anjarwalla met Abubakar, he was accompanied by a full table of staff from the EFCC and Nigeria’s Central Bank. During the meeting, Abubakar brought up the EFCC’s request for certain trading data about Binance’s Nigerian users, pointing out that Binance had responded with only the data for the last year.
Gambaryan said it must have been an oversight due to a last-minute request, and promised he’d get him everything he requested.
Next, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla found themselves in a different conference room with a noticeably somber air. They were waiting for a man named Hamma Adama Bello, a bearded EFCC official who launched into a rant about how Binance was “destroying our economy” and financing terrorism as soon as he entered the room.
Then he explained that Gambaryan and Anjarwalla would be moved to a different location until Binance handed over all the data on every Nigerian who had ever used the exchange.
Gambaryan protested that he didn’t have the ability to release so much data and that he had, in fact, come to Nigeria to report a bribery allegation to Bello’s agency. The statement seemed to surprise Bello, who immediately disregarded it.
By the time the meeting ended, Gambaryan Anjarwalla’s phones were seized and they had become hostages. Aside from Binance turning over all data on Nigerians, Bello also asked that it disable peer-to-peer trading for Nigerian users.
The third demand was unspoken: that Binance pays a massive sum.
Meanwhile, State Department officials offered no solution. All they could do was monitor Gambaryan’s situation.
Their captivity was harsher on Anjarwalla than on Gambaryan. Fortunately, the former escaped with his Kenyan passport, which the Nigerians hadn’t realized he still had.
By the middle of Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s second week of captivity, Binance had agreed to the demand to shut down its Nigerian peer-to-peer trading feature and even removed all naira trading on the exchange.
Still, the EFCC chairman blocked their release and sent the two men back to the guest house after learning Binance had yet to turn over the requested trading data.
It was around that time news of their detainment finally got out, reported by the crypto site DLNews without naming them. The Wall Street Journal and WIRED reported days later that the two detainees were Anjarwalla and Gambaryan.
Securing Gambaryan’s release
When Gambaryan found out his partner had escaped, he knew things would get worse. So, he took out his phone to record a selfie video of his wife and colleagues begging for help. Not long after, he was put into solitary confinement in the EFCC’s detention building.
A couple of days after he was put in lockup, Gambaryan’s attorneys visited him and informed him he was now being charged with money laundering on top of the tax evasion charges he already faced.
Gambaryan was quickly losing hope, but he hadn’t been forgotten. By the time he was in the EFCC cell, some friends and supporters had come together to answer the call for help in his video plea. But it soon became clear the real help he needed to get free wasn’t going to come from the Biden administration.
After all, Binance had just agreed to a massive criminal penalty to the Justice Department and the administration also seemed to have little love for the crypto industry as a whole, hence the reservation.
“They thought maybe the Nigerians have a case,” says Will Frentzen, the Bay Area–based former US attorney who took on Gambaryan’s case as his personal defense attorney. “They weren’t sure what Tigran had done there. So they all took a step back.”
Frentzen and his more senior colleague at Morrison Foerster, former general counsel to the office of the director of national intelligence, Robert Litt, had to approach people in the White House to explain to them how flimsy the criminal case against Gambaryan actually was.
After two weeks in solitary in the EFCC cell, he was transferred to a real jail: Kuje Prison.
While there, he spent time in a “segregation” wing in a 6 x 10-foot room with a toilet, a metal bed frame with a “glorified blanket” for a mattress, and a single window with metal bars.
While Gambaryan’s court case continued with little hope in sight, he fell ill with malaria in May. After 10 days, he was taken to the Turkish-run Nizamiye hospital in Abuja, where he was treated and then sent back to Kuje to tough it out. Gambaryan spent close to a month in bed before he was able to stand and eat again.
Things started to change when he met French Hill and Chrissy Houlahan, two US members of Congress, one from each party.
The next day, June 20, Hill and Houlahan recorded a video on the tarmac of the Abuja airport advocating for his release. Things were also moving back home.
In June, FBI director Christopher Wray brought up Gambaryan’s case during a visit to the country to meet with President Tinubu causing the tax evasion charges to be dropped.
However, the money laundering charge brought by the EFCC remained, prompting further negotiations.
Meanwhile, Gambaryan’s health continued to worsen. Within a few weeks of recovering from pneumonia, he had lost almost all feeling in one of his legs. By July, Gambaryan had to attend his court hearings in a wheelchair.
He was “essentially crippled,” and was taking blood thinners to prevent clots in his legs from the lack of movement by August.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came days later when a video emerged on X of Gambaryan limping into court on a borrowed crutch, dragging one foot behind him. In the clip, he is seen begging for help from a guard in the hallway, who refuses to even give him a hand for fear that he’d garner sympathy.
The video went viral on social media, and by the fall of 2024, the US government, too, seemed to have finally reached a consensus that it was time to get Gambaryan home.
Tigran Gambaryan returns home
After the US government decided to intervene, it did not take long for Gambaryan to be released. At the United Nations General Assembly in New York in late September, the US ambassador to the UN raised Gambaryan’s case in a meeting with the Nigerian foreign minister, “stressing the need for his immediate release,” according to a readout of their meeting.
At that same time, Binance got a truck with a digital billboard to drive around the UN and midtown Manhattan displaying Gambaryan’s face and messages calling out Nigeria for illegally jailing him.
Simultaneously, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan also had a phone call with his Nigerian counterpart, Nuhu Ribadu, in which he asked that Gambaryan be freed. Most impactful of all, US officials made it clear that Gambaryan’s case was going to present an obstacle to any meeting between President Biden and Nigeria’s President Tinubu at the UN General Assembly or elsewhere, a threat that deeply troubled the Nigerians.
Later that October, the court held a hearing without him, and the prosecution dropped all charges against Gambaryan due to his health. A day later, on the Abuja airport tarmac, Nigerian officials handed over Gambaryan’s passport and he was loaded into a private jet stocked with medevac equipment. He was on his way home at last.
Reports emerged last month that he’s been floated by cryptocurrency industry insiders with connections to President Trump for roles as senior head of crypto assets at the SEC or a high-level position in the FBI’s cyber division.
About his sad experience in Nigeria, he says: “I guess it did make me angrier? It made me want to get vengeance against those that did this.”
“I wanted justice. And I still do.”
