A month before obtaining PSAN registration from AMF, Binance recruited Stéphanie Cabossioras, former Deputy Director of AMF, as Legal Manager.
The Anticor Association announced on Tuesday, December 19, that it had reported to the courts suspicions of illegal acquisition of shares related to the recruitment of former Financial Markets Authority (AMF) executive Stéphanie Cabossioras by Binance, a month before the cryptocurrency platform registered as a digital asset service provider. In this report, sent on December 8 to the National Office of the Financial Prosecutor (PNF) and consulted by AFP, Anticor points out that the Deputy Legal Director left her position at the AMF in April 2022 “to join Binance as Legal Director and then Executive Director”. On May 4, 2022, Binance France SAS was registered as a digital asset service provider (PSAN) with the AMF.
With this status, Binance, considered the first global crypto-asset exchange platform, was authorized to hold digital assets and communicate and promote its services. In order to grant this registration, the AMF had to verify a number of elements provided by Binance when it filed in December 2020. Among the required guarantees were “elements related to managers and their good reputation” or “an anti-money laundering system”. money laundering and terrorist financing”, the report recalls.
But Anticor doubts the reality of these verifications, recalling that the US Department of the Treasury opened an investigation into the group’s activities in the United States in 2018. In that investigation, former head of Binance Changpeng Zhao agreed in November to plead guilty to violating US anti-money laundering laws. The company agreed to pay more than $4 billion in fines to the U.S. Treasury Department for the same actions.
A revolving door that clashes with “common sense”
The association is calling for an investigation into the transfer of a senior official, a former Court of Auditors judge, from AMF to Binance, which “appears to be considered an illegal transfer of interests”. According to the association’s lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Soufron, this “revolving door” illustrates “a lack of awareness of the risks of conflicts of interest in the back-and-forth between the public and private sectors in France”, situations that “offend both the law and common sense”.
According to Me Soufron, “we are in two worlds that are sometimes considered above the law, the world of finance on the one hand and the world of technology on the other”. AMF declined to comment and Binance did not respond to AFP. Binance has also been under investigation by Paris prosecutors since February 2022 for illegally soliciting clients and failing to fulfill its obligations to control its clients’ funds.
“Possible State Scandal”
Place MP Aurore Lalucq, who warned of the risks of the transfer in June 2022 and is campaigning for regulation of the sector, said she was “very pleased” with the news.
“For two and a half years, I have been thinking about the ties between the French authorities and Binance, which had a registration in France, while most other countries rejected it”, mainly because of the American investigation, she emphasized. “We are interested in a possible state scandal,” added the MEP.