The Nigerian government has dropped all charges against Tigran Gambaryan, an executive at Binance Holdings, who has been facing money laundering trial from detention since April, Premium Times reports.
A lawyer representing the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) – the prosecuting agency – announced the withdrawal of the charges at the Federal High Court in Abuja Wednesday morning.
The hearing, coming two days before the 25 October earlier scheduled as the return date by the trial judge in the open court last Friday, appeared to have been intentionally held to avoid public attention as much as possible. Announcing the withdrawal of the charges, the lawyer said Mr Gambaryan, a United States citizen, was merely an employee of Binance, whose activities he was being prosecuted for.
Mark Mordi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) representing Mr Gambaryan, agreed with the prosecution, saying that his client was not involved in the company’s broader financial decisions. PREMIUM TIMES reports that Wednesday’s hearing was a climax of the behind-the-scenes diplomatic lobbying that had been ongoing between Nigerian and the US government figures for months for the release of Mr Gambaryan, who has been denied bail on two occasions because the judge considered him to be a flight risk.
Weeks to Wednesday’s hearing have been marked by campaigns by some US lawmakers for the release of Mr Gambaryan, including writing relevant Nigerian and American authorities to intervene. The judge, Emeka Nwite, rejected his second bail application on 11 October, ruling that Mr Gambaryan’s grounds of ill health were not sufficient to release him from detention. The judge then fixed 18 October for continuation for trial but Mr Gambaryan was surprisingly absent.
The judge then rescheduled the trial for 25 October, which appears to have now been overtaken by the event of Wednesday’s unpublicised hearing. Wednesday’s hearing abruptly ended the case. Mr Gambaryan has been held at the Kuje Correctional Centre in Abuja since his arraignment in April.
He is standing trial alongside Binance, a cryptocurrency company, on five counts of money laundering and currency speculation involving as much as $34.4 million.
Binance is facing tax evasion charges in a separate case before another judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja.
In May, the court denied the Binance executive’s bail application, judging him a flight risk. The court’s decision came about two months after Mr Gambaryan’s colleague, Nadeem Anjarwalla, reportedly escaped from a pre-trial custody in Abuja in March.
Since the court’s decision denying him bail, Mr Gambaryan’s health condition has been a recurring feature in the trial and the basis for the subsequent unsuccessful bail application.
On 11 October, the court dismissed Mr Gambaryan’s second bail application anchored on ill health. The judge held that Mr Gambaryan failed to show in the bail application that the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS) did not have adequate facilities or had failed to take care of his ill-health.
He also ruled that the bail application constituted an abuse of court process. Mr Gambaryan’s request could not be granted when he was still challenging the ruling on his earlier bail application at the Court of Appeal. The judge, who stressed that the defendant failed to withdraw his pending appeal against the earlier ruling on his bail application before filling another motion, said such an act amounted to an abuse of court process. “There is no gainsaying on this leg alone that this application is bound to fail,” he said. The judge, however, ordered the NCoS to refer Mr Gambaryan to any standard hospital in Abuja for a period of two to three days.
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