Binance chief steps down from Irish firms at centre of US lawsuit

Binance’s billionaire founder and chief executive Changpeng Zhao has resigned as a director of two Irish companies at the centre of a regulatory lawsuit in the US where he is accused of failing to supervise the group’s activities amid a slew of explosive allegations about its operations.

Mr Zhao – colloquially known as CZ – left his role as director of both Binance Services Holdings and Binance Holdings IE before the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed its landmark legal action against the crypto asset exchange at the end of March, documents filed this week with the Companies Registration Office (CRO) in Dublin reveal.

While the filings indicate that Mr Zhao stepped down on January 18th, the documents were registered with the CRO on Monday, April 3rd and signed by one Kaiser Ng, a Singapore-based Binance executive who has replaced Mr Zhao on the board of both companies.

A spokesman for Binance said: “CZ proactively resigned from his directorships of these companies several months ago to help focus his attention on leadership of the Binance group as co-founder and CEO.”

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The Irish Times reported last week that the CFTC filed legal documents with a federal court in Illinois on March 27th, naming the two Dublin-registered companies as part of “an opaque web of corporate entities” that constitutes Binance, all of which are “ultimately controlled” by Mr Zhao.

Chiefly, the CFTC’s complaints centre around the allegation that the group – including the two Irish entities – allowed American customers to trade in crypto asset derivatives without registering with federal authorities as they were required.

[ US regulator names Irish firms in Binance lawsuit ]

The commission also alleges that Mr Zhao and other senior managers failed to supervise the group’s activities and that Binance “purposefully obscures the identities and locations of the entities” that operate its trading platform.

It is also alleged that Binance “intentionally [destroyed] documents related to illegal conduct” and that Binance employees used messaging apps like Signal to communicate with each other and “VIP” customers.

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The regulator claims that Binance has provided its VIP customers the benefit of “prompt notification of any law enforcement inquiry concerning their account”, using apps that allow them to auto-delete messages “to cover their tracks after communicating about inculpatory matters”.

A spokesman for the company at the time said that the allegations were “unexpected and disappointing” and that Binance had worked “collaboratively” with US authorities while Mr Zhao said in a blog post that the complaint “appears to contain an incomplete recitation of facts”.