- Noah Perlman spoke on a TRM Labs podcast on Wednesday.
- He said he used to talk to Tigran Gambaryan, the jailed Binance exec in Nigeria, every day.
- Binance is collaborating with law enforcement authorities, Perlman said.
Binance’s founder is in jail. Its guilty plea and agreement to pay $4.3 billion in penalties are behind it. Now, the time has come for the regulatory community to support the world’s biggest exchange.
That’s the message Noah Perlman, Binance’s chief compliance officer, delivered in a podcast with Ari Redbord, TRM Labs’ head of policy, on Wednesday.
“Anybody in this compliance space should be rooting for our success now,” said Perlman in a wide ranging conversation that also covered the Nigerian detention of Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan, and the exchange’s work with law enforcement authorities.
“We’ve had issues. We’ve resolved those issues,” Perlman said. “We’ve turned the page.”
Guilty plea
Binance CEO Richard Teng has had his work cut out for him after taking the helm following the resignation of founder Changpeng Zhao in November.
Zhao pleaded guilty to violating US banking law and in April was sentenced to four months in prison.
In court papers, a trio of federal agencies — the US Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — painted a picture of Binance as a lawless enterprise that disregarded anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules as it built a platform handling $10 billion a day in trading volume.
Binance’s misdeeds stemmed from a freewheeling business model that shunned basic practices such as obtaining licences in the nations where it served investing customers.
As part of its settlement with the feds, Binance agreed to embed two independent monitors in the company to oversee and modify its anti-money laundering and know-your-customer practices.
When Perlman joined Binance in January 2023, the company was already in the throes of dealing with a federal grand jury investigation into its lax anti-money laundering practices.
“Certainly, it wasn’t a surprise to me that we were, as a company, facing those issues,” Perlman said on the podcast. “I was read into a lot of what was coming.”
Compliance veterans
Perlman was one of several compliance veterans recruited to Binance as its legal woes mounted.
The Columbia University-trained lawyer served as Morgan Stanley’s head of global head of financial crimes and was a US prosecutor in New York’s Eastern District.
He knew his crypto, too — Perlman was the chief operating officer at Gemini, the digital assets exchange founded in 2014 by the billionaire Winklevoss twins.
Gambaryan, a former special agent with the Internal Revenue Service, joined Binance one month before Perlman. Perlman said he spoke with Gambaryan every day.
Then in February, Gambaryan was dispatched with another colleague to talk to government officials in Nigeria about allegations the exchange was facilitating manipulation of the nation’s currency, the naira, and illicit transactions.
Within days, Gambaryan was detained and then charged with money laundering and tax evasion along with Binance itself. He denied the charges and his lawyer decried the cases as “state-sanctioned hostage taking.”
Binance also denied the allegations called the Nigerian government’s decision to send the Binance executive to prison “outrageous.”
‘We’ve had some cases where we’ve actually disrupted kidnapping.’
— Noah Perlman
Now Gambaryan is awaiting trial and is suffering from malaria and a recent bout of pneumonia and is receiving little medical care, his family told DL News.
“I’ll try not to get emotional, although, I got to tell you, it is emotional,” Perlman said. “Kafkaesque is the word. He had nothing to do with our tax policy or anything historic that could or could not have been with money laundering.”
Perlman also told Redbord how Binance assisted in a counterrorism arrests and helped stop kidnappings.
Binance was “super proud” of its work on a counterterrorism case that led to arrests across the world, he said.
Arrest
Perlman was referencing the arrest of an alleged ISIS recruiter in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2023, Redbord later told DL News.
“We’ve had some cases where we’ve actually disrupted kidnapping,” Perlman added during the podcast.
He didn’t elaborate, and Binance representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ben Weiss is a Dubai Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at bweiss@dlnews.com.