‘Is Daddy on the Airplane?’ Jailed Binance Exec Gambaryan Family’s Ordeal in New Podcast

“The other day, I took them (kids) to a nearby park and my son saw an airplane in the sky and said, ‘Mommy, look there’s an airplane. Is Daddy on the airplane?’” said Yuki Gambaryan, the wife of the Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan.

Yuki was speaking to Illicit Edge’s new podcast “Designated” which will focus on stories related to financial crimes.

Tigran Gambaryan has been detained since February in Nigeria, where he was invited as Binance’s head of financial crime compliance to discuss the nation’s dispute with the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Since then, his health has deteriorated. He has been suffering from malaria and a herniated disc, which has left him struggling to walk with a crutch.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said, illustrating how hard it is to “keep things from” her two children, 5 and 10 years old. “I’m not doing well mentally or physically. I am having this constant fear of losing Tigran. What if he gets another malaria and die(s)?”

Gambaryan isn’t just any crypto industry executive. He’s a former investigator with the Internal Revenue Service, who became a “kind of legendary figure within this crypto crime investigation world” as the “agent at the center of so many cases,” said WIRED’s senior writer Andy Greenberg in part two of the podcast. This is the “reason that Tigran is the protagonist of my book,” Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, he said.

Gambaryan’s background as a federal employee has perhaps contributed to the case becoming a legal, diplomatic and business quagmire, with Nigeria playing hardball with Binance and, in particular, the U.S.

“This is an obvious case of holding somebody hostage to punish a business they have a problem with,” said U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, (R-GA) in whose district the Gambaryan family lives. “He’s just being treated absolutely horribly and he is an American citizen, and that should be taken very seriously by our government. America has a tremendous amount of leverage over the country.

“All cards should be on the table,” McCormick said on the podcast. Gambaryan faces money laundering charges. Binance is facing a tax-evasion trial in the country, which is demanding $10 billion in penalties for enabling some $26 billion of untraceable funds. This and other alleged facilitation of illegal capital outflows by the crypto industry at large purportedly led to the Nigerian naira weakening to record lows against the dollar.

“He is being held as a hostage, as leverage, to make Binance pay or to find a scapegoat for Nigeria’s own inability to manage its national currency,” Greenberg said. Gambaryan’s wife Yuki said, “They can pursue any legal actions whatever to solve this issue they’re having with Binance. But they just don’t need Tigran there.”

She also said that her husband had previously been in Nigeria in January and at that time “he had almost got detained.”

“He and his team attended some meetings, and it went hostile. They basically told them that they would confiscate their passports. So, Tigran and his team just immediately got out of the country. So, it was a close call.” On the second trip, she said, my understanding is that Tigran was assured things would be okay.

Nigeria’s authorities did not immediately respond to a CoinDesk request for comment.

The Designated podcast is presented in partnership with blockchain analytics company, Chainalysis, and is supported by the Crypto Council for Innovation.