Amrita Srivastava is the whistleblower, who was fired in May 2023. Binance says it was already aware of the bribery case and that Srivastava was fired for poor performance. Amrita Srivastava, a former senior executive at Binance in London, filed a formal complaint with an employment tribunal in that city against the cryptocurrency exchange. Srivastava alleges that she was unfairly dismissed after raising the alarm about a case of bribery within the company. Srivastava worked remotely on Binance's Link platform, which connects third-party brokers and clients to the exchange. She reports that a co-worker requested a bribe from a client to give him preferential treatmentensuring that the colleague posed as a consultant to accelerate the client's integration into Binance. This colleague no longer works for the company. The complaint indicates that Srivastava informed her superiors about this incident in April 2023, and just a month later she was fired. According to his statement, she joined Binance in April 2022 after working at Mastercard Inc., where she was head of financial technology coverage for Western Europe. He hoped to help improve compliance within Binance, but instead found a “chaotic work environment” and pressure to comply with financial agreements, Bloomberg reports. Srivastava was at the Link unit, where Binance was looking to fill a revenue gap after discovering that a quarter of the unit's revenue They came from a client linked to Iran. A regular customer from the UK revealed to Srivastava that he had given money to his colleague, prompting his complaint. “I wasn't prepared to look the other way when someone had scammed a customer,” Srivastava said. For its part, Binance responded to these accusations by stating that they were already informed of the bribery incident and that the decision to terminate Srivastava's employment It was due to his poor performance.
“The decision to terminate his employment for poor performance predates concerns he raised about an issue that was already known and being investigated by our internal audit team,” the exchange said in a statement. Binance's lawyer also argued in court papers that the company has a culture of regularly eliminate underperforming employees. Awards for whistleblowing at the UK employment tribunal are not capped, unlike unfair dismissals, which are capped at £105,700, or about $137,600. Srivastava called her experience at Binance detrimental to her career, an impact she says will have to reverse in the coming years.
Binance, known as the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been involved in multiple lawsuits at various levels. Recently, he was sued by the failed FTX exchange, as reported by BitcoinDynamic, to recover USD 1.8 billion that was allegedly fraudulently transferred by Sam Bankman-Fried. Likewise, Binance was the subject of legal action by the United States Department of Justice, which seeks to confiscate approximately $16 million in cryptocurrencies from an exchange account, as this medium also reported.