Changpeng “CZ” Zhao took the opportunity to distance himself from recent allegations against Binance of having been involved in handling transactions that potentially enabled the financing of terrorism in Iran.
“I have no interest in doing that,” said the exchange’s founder and former CEO, who agreed to leave his company under a criminal deal with the U.S. “I live in a country that is being attacked by Iran. Even before that, I just wasn’t interested in that,” he said in a video appearance at the Digital Chamber’s DC Blockchain Summit on Wednesday.
CZ, a resident of the United Arab Emirates, cited a pair of civil lawsuits recently dismissed in US courts that accused Binance of acting as a conduit for terrorist financing. It also argued that the Iran-linked transactions in question do not attract fees and would not offer any commercial appeal for the company to get involved.
“There is no benefit,” said CZ, who had served a prison sentence and received a pardon from President Donald Trump, defending the implications against his former company.
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange that settled U.S. anti-money laundering and sanctions violation allegations in 2023, sued the Wall Street Journal last week for reporting that it had fired compliance staff who had flagged suspicious transactions that could have violated sanctions. Internal investigators had allegedly detected more than $1 billion in crypto transfers from Chinese clients to wallets linked to Iranian financial networks.
The company has stated that it could find no evidence that accounts on its platforms had transacted directly with Iranian entities.
CZ, who is about to publish a memoir he worked on while in prison, said he has been the target of false accusations.
“Because of the way they attack, they use completely false and unfounded information,” he said.
Read more: Binance tells Senate inquiry no accounts sent crypto directly to Iran
