The Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga revealed this to the BBC.
According to Onanuga, Binance profited substantially from its “illegal transactions” in Nigeria, while the nation suffered huge losses.
Onanuga stated that Binance was not registered in Nigeria and had no presence in the country, but people used the platform to arbitrarily fix dollar-Naira rates, a practice which had negatively impacted on the value of Naira.
He said the Binance team was already cooperating with the Nigerian government by providing useful information and had already suspended Naira-related transactions on its platform.
“The platform fixes the exchange rate in Nigeria, which is illegal. The Central Bank of Nigeria is the only authority that can fix the exchange rate for Nigeria. Onanuga further stated that Binance harbours a lot of people who fix exchange rates which impacted Nigeria badly at a time when the government is trying to stabilise the economy.
Binance, he further noted, influenced the foreign exchange rates through currency speculations which made the Naira value to fall by almost 70% in recent months.