Arnold & Porter Secures Release of Detained Binance Executive From Nigeria

Arnold & Porter played a key role representing Binance to obtain the release on October 24 of Tigran Gambaryan, the company’s head of financial crime compliance, who was detained in February in Nigeria as a result of a dispute between Nigeria and Binance.

Following many months of sustained effort by the Arnold & Porter team, including coordination with senior U.S. government officials and direct advocacy with Nigerian officials and their intermediaries, the Government of Nigeria ultimately agreed to the U.S. government’s request for humanitarian release and withdrew the case against Gambaryan to allow for urgent medical treatment abroad.

The Arnold & Porter team led the evacuation efforts and was on 24/7 alert, at the request of U.S. officials, to devise and execute the sensitive and complex travel arrangements, navigating the logistics and airspace of multiple countries to achieve a safe and successful repatriation of Gambaryan.

The matter was featured in The New York Times article, “How Two Allies Wrestled Over a Crypto Giant and a Prisoner,” which includes a quote from Deborah Curtis, White Collar Defense & Investigations partner and former Deputy General Counsel for Litigation and Investigations at the CIA.

The Arnold & Porter team representing Binance was led by Curtis and included John Bellinger, co-chair of the firm’s Global Law and Public Policy group, and Ambassador Thomas A. Shannon, Jr., Senior International Policy Advisor.