(Bloomberg) -- A former Binance Holdings Ltd. executive sued the cryptocurrency exchange in the UK for whistleblowing, claiming a colleague asked for a bribe from a customer in order to give them preferential treatment.
Amrita Srivastava, a London-based senior employee, said at an employment tribunal that she was unfairly dismissed after raising concerns about the alleged bribery.
She alleged the co-worker took money “under the guise of providing consultative services” to speed the customer’s integration into Binance, all the time pretending that he didn’t work for the company. The colleague has since left the firm.
The tribunal hearing offers a rare glimpse into the secretive crypto trading venue while it grappled with a US investigation. Binance in November 2023 pleaded guilty to violations of US anti-money laundering and sanctions laws and was hit with a landmark $4.3 billion penalty.
Srivastava, who worked remotely on Binance’s Link platform, which connects external brokers and customers to the exchange, is suing Binance Europe Ltd. She said she told managers about the bribery in April 2023, only to be dismissed a month later.
Binance’s lawyer said the company already knew about the incident and that she lost her job for poor performance.
“The decision to end her employment for poor performance pre-dated concerns she raised about an issue that was already known and under investigation by our internal audit team,” Binance said in a statement.
Srivastava joined Binance in April 2022 after a stint at Mastercard Inc. where she was head of fintech coverage for western Europe. She said that she believed there was a genuine desire within the organization to help “fix” Binance and that the company’s management “aimed to get their compliance in order.”
Instead, she says she found an increasingly “chaotic” working environment. While at the Link unit, Srivastava said “the pressure was on for deals to be delivered.” Binance was keen to fill the “revenue gap” in Link’s revenue after identifying that around a quarter of the unit’s service revenue previously came from a customer with ties to Iran.
She said a customer who regularly traveled through the UK then told her that he’d handed over money to her colleague.
“I was not prepared to look the other way when someone had defrauded a customer and yet was still a part of the team – some things are just right and wrong, and asking for a bribe and defrauding a customer was not a gray area – it is most definitely wrong,” Srivastava said in a witness statement.
Binance’s executives were already aware of the bribery incident and had escalated the matter, Binance’s lawyer said in court filings. The firm had a culture of regularly weeding out under-performers.
Awards for whistleblowing at the UK’s employment tribunal are unlimited, while unfair dismissal is capped at £105,700.
“My experience at Binance has been personally damaging to my career, an impact I will continue to have to undo over the next few years,” Srivastava said in a filing for the hearing.
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