Key takeaways:
- The new investors in Binance France split 100% ownership of the business equally among them.
- Binance France stated that the two new recipients were part of Binance’s founding staff but did not reveal their names.
The new investors in Binance France split 100% ownership of the business equally among them. The Financial Markets Authority (AMF) of the nation issued a warning to the corporation in December, necessitating the action.
The original beneficial owner had issues with the US Justice Department, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Following up on these issues, according to a blog post, the AMF notified Binance France that it needed to take action. Alternatively, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the previous CEO of Binance, could not retain ownership of the business.
The post stated that Zhao had already left the company. However, he has not yet started his four-month prison sentence in the United States, having entered a guilty plea to the charges brought against him in November.
Binance France stated that the two new recipients were part of Binance’s founding staff but did not reveal their names. According to the Pappers information service, they are Yulong Yan and Lihua He. Not a lot of information is known about either person.
Allan Yan, the first product director, is likely who Yan is according to the Binance white paper. Zhao founded Bijie Tech, a firm Yan co-founded to provide software to crypto exchanges, before Binance. 2017 saw the closure of that Shanghai-based business.
A corporation that holds a license in one nation of the European Union may export that license to any of the 27 member states under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) laws. After operating in the nation illegally since 2020, Binance is said to have obtained AMF approval in May 2022. Before Zhao was charged in the US, it was also purportedly the subject of an anti-money laundering investigation.
After the CFTC filed a lawsuit against the business in March 2023, Binance France also had trouble locating a banking partner in France. Stéphanie Cabossioras, the executive director of Binance France, was among several executives who left the firm in October 2023.
Regulators shut down Binance’s operations in Belgium later that June after the company was refused a license to operate as a virtual asset service provider in the Netherlands.
