Binance reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and other agencies in November last year, pleading guilty and agreeing to pay a fine of US$4.3 billion. Founder CZ(CZ) admitted to violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws and other charges and resigned. He became the CEO of Binance and successfully released bail after paying $175 million.
After months of waiting, his sentence is expected to be announced at the sentencing hearing at the end of this month (4/30).
CZ may be sentenced to 3 years in prison?
According to the sentencing memorandum submitted by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday local time, it argued that CZ should be sentenced to 36 months in prison and pay a $50 million fine after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act in November last year. The document states:
The verdict in this case not only sends a message to Mr. Zhao, but also sends a message to the world. Mr. Zhao received huge rewards for violating U.S. laws, and the cost of such violations must be significant in order to effectively punish Mr. Zhao’s criminal behavior and deter those who Someone who tried to build wealth and a business empire by breaking American law.
CZ's original plea agreement carried a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison. However, the Ministry of Justice stated in this document that "the scope and consequences of CZ's misconduct are huge," and therefore "it is appropriate to increase the penalty here."
The memo also criticized CZ for failing to implement an effective anti-money laundering program at Binance, and illegal actors exploited the Binance exchange in various ways, including:
- Operate mixing services to hide the origin and ownership of cryptocurrencies
- Trading illegal proceeds from ransomware attacks
- Transferring Dark Web Proceeds, Exchange Hacks, and Various Internet-related Scams
CZ issued a statement of defense
However, according to Coindesk’s latest report , CZ’s defense documents stated that he did not know and was not “clearly informed” of the specific transactions involving criminal funds on Binance:
“Although the probation sentence mentions a conversation in which Binance’s Chief Compliance Officer warned CZ that there were users on the Binance platform from countries sanctioned by the United States...the reality is that Binance, as a non-profit company, U.S. companies, not banned from having users from U.S.-sanctioned countries on their platforms
By contrast, the sanctions charge to which the company pleaded guilty was a novel and narrow charge (first brought against Binance) that an algorithmic matching engine violated U.S. sanctions laws by randomly pairing users from sanctioned countries with U.S. users."
In addition, regarding these transactions that are accused of violating sanctions, the document also states that they only account for a small part of Binance’s transaction volume and are almost negligible. Therefore, CZ’s lawyer argued that CZ should be sentenced to probation instead of imprisonment, emphasizing that he had no risk of re-offending.
BNB price rose 1.1% in the past 24 hours
According to CoinGecko, the BNB token price is currently trading at $608.16, an increase of 1.1% in the past 24 hours. After the results of CZ’s sentencing hearing come out in the future, it is recommended that investors should pay attention to the fluctuations of BNB tokens.
