After fleeing China ahead of looming crypto regulations, Binance needed a new home. It failed to find one in Malta. Then it tried London, only to be pushed out when it again couldn’t obtain a local crypto license. As it struggled to find a base in Europe, a tiny nation finally opened its doors: Lithuania. Not only did the country offer access to the European Union, it provided a place for the massive crypto exchange to establish a subsidiary and park billions of dollars.
Binance’s arrival in the Baltic nation appeared to be mutually beneficial: The company’s local subsidiary Bifinity was Lithuania’s second-largest corporate taxpayer last year, contributing $44 million, according to Lithuanian tax filings, and Binance used it to process nearly $7 billion in crypto transactions.
But established outside the oversight of a major financial center, Bifinity was also used to facilitate some of Binance’s more dubious transactions. Bifinity sent $6.3 billion to another subsidiary called Merit Peak, a British Virgin Islands-based firm that the SEC alleged had commingled customer deposits with the company’s funds. (Binance said the allegations were “simply wrong.”) Other funds were used to purchase a $55 million private jet and some $62.5...
Former Democratic Party lawmaker An Min-suk was elected as the progressive camp’s candidate for the June Gyeonggi Province superintendent of education election. Candidate An said, “I will become a...