The Federal High Court in Abuja has remanded a top executive of crypto company Binance in a prison in Abuja after postponing the hearing of his bail application for 11 days.
The judge, Emeka Nwite, ordered Tigran Gambaryan’s remand in prison on Monday pending the hearing of his bail application, expected to come up on 18 April.
Mr Nwite issued the remand order after the defendant’s arraignment on five counts of money laundering on Monday.
The judge, in issuing the order, agreed with the contention of the prosecution that the appropriate place of remand of a defendant after arraignment is the correctional centre.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission had, on 28 March, charged Mr Gambaryan alongside Binance and another of the company’s top executives, Nadeem Anjarwalla.
However, only Mr Gambaryan was available for arraignment before the trial judge on Monday.
EFCC wrote in the charges that Mr Gambaryan’s colleague and co-defendant, Mr Anjarwalla, who reportedly escaped from lawful custody in Abuja last month, was on the run.
Mr Gambaryan pleaded not guilty to the five counts charged by the EFCC when read to him in open court on Monday.
The judge recorded a plea of not-guilty plea for Binance, based on the request by the prosecuting lawyer, Ekele Iheanacho.
In the five counts, EFCC accused the three defendants of committing money laundering offences involving $35.4 million.
Earlier, the court dismissed Mr Gambaryan’s objection to mode of service of the charges.
Mr Gambaryan’s lawyer, Mark Mordi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria , had contested that Binance as a corporate entity must be served the charges either in person or by substituted means for an arraignment to take place.
Meanwhile, in his ruling, the judge held that Messrs Gambaryan and Anjarwalla had deposed to an affidavit that they had been in Nigeria since February to meet the Nigerian government as representatives of the crypto exchange firm.
Therefore, the judge said Mr Gambaryan’s refusal to accept service of the charges on behalf of Binance was unlawful.
Subsequently, the judge ordered the remand of Mr Gambaryan at the Kuje Correctional Centre in Abuja until 18 April, when the defendant’s bail request will be heard and determined.
In an impassioned tone on Monday, Mr Gambaryan’s lawyer, Mr Mordi, appealed to the judge to either hear his client’s bail application on Thursday or order his remand in the custody of the prosecuting agency, the EFCC.
The lawyer recalled that Mr Gambaryan had been held for upward of 40 days against statutory provisions.
“The 2nd defendant (Mr Gambaryan) has been in detention for upward of 40 days. He has been held for 40 days. This is a foreign national. I urge the court to order that he be detained by the EFCC.
“He is debilitated and devastated by the conditions under which he is kept,” Mr Mordi said.
However, EFCC’s lawyer, Mr Iheanacho, noted that the appropriate place for Mr Gambaryan’s custody post-arraignment was the correctional centre in Kuje, Abuja.
He insisted that many Nigerians had been remanded in United States prisons on account of criminal trials.
“This defendant should be detained at the correctional centre after the arraignment. There have been Nigerians who had been convicted in the U.S and were detained in their prisons,” the judge ruled.
The judge then postponed the hearing of the bail application until 18 April and fixed 2 May for commencement of trial.
In a separate case instituted by the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the prosecution accused Binance and its executives of tax frauds. FIRS filed the case on 22 March
Count one alleged that while involved in carrying and offering services to subscribers on their platform, known as Binance, they failed to register with the FIRS for the purpose of paying all relevant taxes administered by the service.
Count two alleged that while they were offering taxable services to subscribers on their trading platform known as Binance, they failed to issue invoices to those subscribers for the purposes of determining and payment of their Value Added Tax (VAT).
Count three accused them of offering services to subscribers on their trading platform in the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies and the remittance and transfer of those assets, and that having offered those services, it was obliged to deduct VAT and did fail to deduct necessary VAT arising from their operations.
In count four, the prosecution accused them of offering services to subscribers on their trading platform and aiding and abetting those subscribers to unlawfully refuse to pay taxes or neglect to pay those taxes.
The alleged offences, according to the prosecution, are punishable under Sections 8 and 29 of the VAT Act of 1993 (as Amended), Section 40 of the FIRS Establishment Act, 2007 (as amended) and under provisions of Section 94 of the Companies Income Tax Act, as amended, respectively.
