A senior U.S. senator has opened an inquiry into Binance seeking records on alleged transactions that funneled nearly $2 billion to Iran-linked terrorist organizations and other entities and payments that helped circumvent sanctions on Russian oil, Bloomberg said.
In a letter to Binance co-CEO Richard Teng, Senator Richard Blumenthal requested details on the reported transactions and on alleged firings of compliance personnel who identified the activity. Blumenthal is the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, PSI.
“The scale of the newly-revealed illicit transfers—uncaught until nearly $2 billion dollars flowed to sanctioned entities—and the unexplained firing of internal investigators call into question Binance’s compliance with American sanctions and banking laws,” Blumenthal wrote.
The letter cites a story by The Wall Street Journal on Binance’s alleged dismantling of an internal investigation into $1 billion sent to a network funding Iran-backed terror groups, and a report by The New York Times on the discovery by compliance staff of a Iranian network that used more than 1,500 Binance accounts and transferred approximately $1.7 billion to Iranian entities with links to terrorism, according to the report.
The news outlet that first broke the story, Fortune, reported earlier this month that Binance had fired the compliance investigators who first flagged the suspicious activity.
Blumenthal’s request comes as Binance’s political and business posture has strengthened under the Trump administration, Bloomberg said. President Donald Trump pardoned former Binance CEO and co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao in October after he served four months in prison for failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering (AML) program.
Binance pleaded guilty to AML failings in a 2023 settlement and agreed to pay more than $4 billion in fines.
“Binance is a repeat offender: it has long been aware that the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies use its cryptocurrency platform as a convenient and reliable means to bypass international sanctions, anti-money laundering controls, and other banking restrictions,” Blumenthal wrote in the letter penned Tuesday.
Read more at Bloomberg