Under Zhao’s plea agreement, he will agree to the recommendation that the court impose a $50 million fine to the CFTC and won’t make any statements “contradicting his acceptance of responsibility,” according to a separate filing from Monday.Īs for Binance’s plea agreement, the company will accept the resignation of Zhao and prohibit him “from any present or future involvement in operating” the business from the beginning of the plea acceptance and “ends three years from the date a monitor is appointed,” the Monday filing stated. financial system must also play by the rules that keep us all safe from terrorists, foreign adversaries, and crime or face the consequences,” Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen said in the release. “Any institution, wherever located, that wants to reap the benefits of the U.S. According to court documents, Zhao told Binance employees it was “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” and prioritized the exchange’s growth there over complying with U.S. customers, according to Chairman Rostin Behnam of the CFTC.

The crypto exchange collected about $1.35 billion in trading fees from U.S. economic sanctions “in a deliberate and calculated effort to profit from the U.S. It added that the respective parties allegedly violated U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.īinance, Zhao and other related parties “knowingly failed to register as a money services business” and violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement an anti-money laundering program, a filing on the charges stated. “The message here should be clear: using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” U.S. Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an anti-money laundering program. The crypto exchange “admits it engaged in anti-money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting and sanctions violations,” the DOJ release stated, calling it the “largest corporate resolution” that included criminal charges for an executive. Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has also agreed to pay about $4.3 billion to resolve the DOJ’s investigations, the agency said in a press release on Tuesday.Īs a part of Binance’s guilty plea, it has also reached agreements with the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and will credit about $1.8 billion toward those resolutions.

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