There is an issue that is extremely important to discuss in Europe in light of Changpeng Zhao’s deal with the US Department of Justice and the US government. The fact that CZ is being indicted in the US before any EU member-state could have prosecuted him in a European court is a testament that European authorities are incapable of addressing transnational crime in Europe by sophisticated financial actors. This gross failure is evident and apparent for many reasons.
Firstly, Binance was being investigated thoroughly by various EU member-states, separately, each with its own investigation, including Malta, Ireland, and France. So, what happened to these investigations? As soon as these enforcement entities came to request information from different EU member states, they either did not request the information at all due to administrative complications of such requests or they refused to follow any request they received from other European enforcement agencies. The police and enforcement agencies in several EU-member states have been convinced that Binance has been faking its accounts and hiding the true nature of its business operations in Europe, but given that most of Binance’s filed accounts do at face value comply with local auditing standards, no effort was spared to dig deeper given that doing so would have meant an intensive collaboration between other European agencies and entities and the hiring of expert investigators.
Unfortunately, many regulatory agencies and police departments in Europe, especially those in Malta have been proletarianised, with their members being more similar to textbook civil servants rather than actual specialists and investigators who understand sophisticated financial crime. The US authorities could only reach Binance by hiring specialised investigators who were intimately familiar with the crypto industry and blockchain technology. It’s a very different story in European police forces, but even more so at Europol which has been absent during the investigations on Binance. European police agencies don’t have the will and the expertise to fight sophisticated international financial crime.
I don’t think that financial analysts have yet realised what all of this means and this should be glaringly simple. It’s incredibly damning for European authorities that Changpeng Zhao could operate in Europe while laundering funds for terrorist organisations and sanctioned regimes. If CZ could do it, anyone else could and CZ is surely not the only one who was operating in Europe and conducting very serious crimes some of which are against our national security. If it wasn’t for the DOJ, CZ would have continued operating in Europe with total impunity.
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