US President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, on Thursday, nearly two years after the crypto boss admitted breaking sanctions on Iran.
A Canadian national widely known by his initials CZ, Zhao pleaded guilty in November 2023 to a money laundering charge over his company allowing hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit transactions with the Islamic Republic.
“A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything,” Trump told reporters as he issued the pardon. “He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything.”
“They said that what he did is not even a crime,” the president went on. “That he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”
Binance was founded in China in 2017 and is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume.
In announcing the guilty plea agreements with Binance and Zhao, the US Justice Department said at the time that the company and its former CEO had knowingly violated US sanctions against Iran.
“Binance did not implement controls that would prevent US users from trading with users in Iran and, because of this intentional failure, between January 2018 and May 2022, Binance willfully caused over $898 million in trades between US users and users ordinarily resident in Iran,” the department stated.
In addition to Zhao’s sentence, the Treasury Department imposed a $3.4 billion penalty on Binance, the largest in the department’s history, for failing to implement anti-money laundering procedures.
“Binance failed to report to the financial crimes enforcement network transactions associated with terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” the department wrote.
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