The resignation of Binance’s chief financial officer (CFO) Kaiser Ng just nine days after North Korean hackers drained $6.3 billion from the exchange has raised eyebrows on social media.
Ng’s original resignation announcement earned half a million impressions on X, plus a quarter of a million via Bloomberg and millions more from other accounts.
According to Binance co-CEO Yi, the handover had been in the works for half a year. However, the timeline roughly lines up with a Bloomberg report about the hollowing out of Binance’s financial crime monitoring leadership.
Just two months previously, Fortune reported that Binance fired five internal investigators who had flagged Iranian sanctions issues.
For context, a Senate inquiry opened in February into Binance’s potential Iran-related sanctions violations. That month, the New York Times counted $1.7 billion leaving two Binance accounts for Iranian entities, drawing Congressional scrutiny.
Before all of those firings, President Donald Trump brought Binance’s misconduct into mainstream news by pardoning founder Changpeng Zhao.
Amid Binance’s financial oversight turmoil this year, Zhao’s personal fortune has been declining.
Read more: Binance faces second probe over Iran-linked billions
Binance CFO resigns as third-party oversight shifts
It seems as though key departures from Binance this year have had two explanations. Meanwhile, third-party oversight at the company tends to be temporary and transient.
Aside from Binance’s in-house compliance, Mazars published a single Binance reserves report in December 2022.
Under its November 2023 guilty plea, Binance accepted a three-year DOJ monitorship through May 2027 and a five-year FinCEN monitorship through May 2029.
In September 2024, Binance hired Grant Thornton as an adviser, although it has no auditing relationship.
As of Saturday, Ng is resigning from the role he has held since January 2022. His farewell post thanked “advisors and auditors.”
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