American entrepreneur and crypto king, Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for his role in defrauding users of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

In a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the defense argument misleading, logically flawed, and speculative.

Kaplan said Bankman-Fried had obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses in mounting his defense — something Kaplan said he weighed in his sentencing decision.

After a two-hour hearing the judge, Lewis Kaplan, said Bankman-Fried knew what he was doing was criminal and regretted making a bad bet about the likelihood of being caught.

Bankman-Fried, wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, struck an apologetic tone, saying he had made a series of “selfish” decisions while leading FTX and “threw it all away.”

“It haunts me every day,” he said in a statement. “There are a lot of mistakes that I made.” 

Bankman-Fried, however, told the court that FTX had the ability to repay customers when it collapsed.

Meanwhile, the prosecutors said Bankman-Fried took more than $10bn (£7.9bn) from unsuspecting customers in “one of the biggest financial frauds” in US history.

FTX was valued at $32bn before it went bankrupt in 2022 and SBF crafted a public image that drew in celebrities, politicians and business titans.

Prosecutors had sought as much as 50 years, while Bankman-Fried’s legal team argued for no more than six and half years. 

He was convicted on seven criminal counts in November and has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since.

[Vanguard]

The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) says it has shut down Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), an international fast food restaurant chain, at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, over discrimination against a passenger.

On March 27, Debola Daniel, son of Gbenga Daniel, former governor of Ogun state, had posted on his official X page about his experience at KFC, MMIA branch.

According to Daniel, the restaurant had stopped him and his family from entering, stating that “no wheelchairs were allowed”.

“Just as we were about to sit, the lady at the till – who was apparently the manager – called out loudly, ‘No Wheelchairs Allowed’,” he posted.

“She refused to listen to reason and stood her ground that at kfcnigeria Murtala Muhammed branch, wheelchairs and wheelchair users of all shapes and sizes were not permitted in the premises and we should leave immediately.

“I have never been the type of person to make a fuss or complain about my disability.”

Reacting to the development in a statement on Thursday, Obiageli Orah, director, public affairs and consumer protection at FAAN, said the authority had investigated the matter and made their decision.

Orah added that the shutdown will take effect from today, March 28.

“In line with Lagos State law on people with special needs, Part C, section 55 of General Provisions n Discrimination which states that, ‘A person shall not deprive another person of access to any place, vehicle or facility that members of the public are entitled to enter or use on the basis of the disability of that person’,” FAAN said.

“The management of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has closed the KFC facility at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos with effect from March 28, 2024.

“This is as a result of a social media report by a Passenger with Reduced Mobility (PRM), alleging discriminatory treatment he received at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos.

“The MD/CE of FAAN, Mrs Olubunmi, Kuku intervened swiftly by deploying a management team comprising the Director, Public Affairs and Consumer Protection,  Mrs Obiageli Orah, the Regional  Manager  South West, Mr Sunday Ayodele, Ag. General Manager Public Affairs, Mrs Ijeoma Nwosu-Igbo and the International Terminal Manager, Mr Kerri, to investigate the allegation. 

“It is based on the findings of the team that FAAN  has shut down the KFC facility at the MMA, where the incident occurred.”

Orah said the authority has instructed KFC management to tender an unreserved apology, in writing, to the affected PRM and a policy statement of non-discrimination be written and pasted conspicuously at the door post of their facility at MMIA before it resumes operation.

The authority also apologised to Daniel and assured all airport users that they will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that the rights of every passenger are not infringed upon.

The CEO of X (formerly known as Twitter), Elon Musk, has announced that all accounts with 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free.

Musk, a billionaire who purchased X in October 2022, also said that accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free.

He made this known in a post on his X handle on Thursday.

“Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free,” Musk said.

DAILY POST reports that the X Premium subscription gives account owners access to a number of features such as reduced ads, access to apply for revenue sharing and more.

While the X Premium+ subscription comes with some additional benefits such as no ads and reply prioritisation.

Musk had confirmed on Wednesday amid the growing rivalry with OpenAI that the Grok AI chatbot which was only accessible for X Premium+ users before now will now be accessible to all Premium users soon.

The billionaire has focused his efforts on getting users to pay a nominal subscription amount in order to bolster the social media giant’s revenue.

[DailyPost]

Google has said that it has blocked over 5.5 billion adverts and suspended 12.7 million others for violating its policies.

The search engine giant also said in a statement on Wednesday that it had removed adverts from over 2.1 billion pages.

“Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet,” it said.

In 2023, it said scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise.

It added: “Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.”

[DailyTrust]

Fortuitously, we now have some discordant voices coming from northern political elite, once united only by their opposition to our independence article of faith – “that each federating unit develops at its own pace without interference from others”. This is however coming after over 50 years of our nation’s nightmare, 15 years of Boko Haram’s mindless killings and devastation, nine years of terrorism by immigrant herdsmen and 10 years of banditry by subsistence farmers and cattle herders. 

For other federating nationalities held down by the conspiracy of the dominant, this was nothing but a betrayal of the ideals of visionary Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and the first Premier of Northern Nigeria who was assassinated in 1966 by misguided young soldiers.

First was the hypocrisy of Ango Abdulahi’s Northern Elders Forum who, after serially betraying the aspirations of the northern masses that look up to them for direction, like the proverbial Ostrich that hides its head in the sand, now turns around to find whipping dog in President Tinubu and his less than one year old administration. Speaking on the abduction and release of the Kuriga school children, it declared: “The Northern Elders Forum firmly declares that enough is enough… Unfortunately, just months into the Tinubu administration, there have already been clear signs of failure in providing the vital aspects of security of life and property to citizens.”

Of course no one should hold brief for President Tinubu. The buck stops at his table. But it is sad that the northern leaders continue to live in denial. Except northern leaders, every discerning person cannot but see the linkage between the self-inflicted crisis in the north and their feudal system which is ideologically opposed to any form of egalitarianism including sending children of the poor that are today on rampage to school.

 But it was just as well that there was the dissenting voice of Dr Shehu Mahdi, President Buhari’s former controversial executive Secretary of NHIS, who chose not to be economical with the truth. For him, northern leaders are the scourge of the north and they alone can find peace for their people. For him, “With northern vice president, northern Speaker, northern head of the military, northern NSC, Northern Secretary etc, it is time for northern leaders to lock themselves up in a room, look at themselves in the mirror and admit they have failed their people and resolve on how to bring peace to our lives”.

But sadly, it has not always been like this. Ahmadu Bello, the great grandson of Sultan Muhammad Bello, the second Sultan of Sokoto after Usmanu Dan Fodio, was proud of his ancestry. Some even described him as arrogant for referring to the Bantus of Benue trough as his great grandfather’s slaves. But he was a decent and selfless leader. His controversial northernisation policy was designed to protect his people. And it “reflects the cotemporary desires for modernization, struggle over who would direct and benefit from such changes and concern over the cultural and moral scaffolding of independence Nigeria”. (Douglas Anthony, Decolonization, Race and Region in Nigeria, Northernisation revisited (International Journal of African historical studies Vop.51, No.1 (2018)

Ahmadu Bello’s policies were never designed to impede the development of Nigeria but to make the north more competitive in an emerging Nigerian state where most of the ethnic nationalities wanted their own nation within the greater Nigerian nation state. If Ahmadu Bello and his northern pathfinders had insisted on 50% of membership of the national assembly in 1950, it was a survival strategy in an emerging Nigeria where the less educated north unlike other nationalities did not have their first doctors and lawyers until mid-fifties. 

He and his group copied what was good from other regions and strived to build a formidable northern bureaucracy and academic institution. We have no evidence that ABU that produced a world-acclaimed intellectual such as the late Professor Ayodele Awojobi, alias ‘the Akoka Giant’, whose PhD thesis from UK University was said to be responsible for off-shore oil mining on the high seas, and the famous architect, Fola Alade, the designer of abandoned Federal Secretariat, Ikoyi could not be said to be inferior to the nation’s other institutions.

 Ahmadu Bello, a man of great vision,  will today be probably troubled in his grave  to discover that beneficiaries of his visionary leadership have become ethnic irredentists collaborating with less endowed military soldiers of fortune who joined the military in order to climb the social ladder (many initial recruits were picked from motor parks in Kaduna while Buhari attested to the magnanimity of Ahmadu Bello who picked him up from his Daura village saving him from remaining a herdsman) to foist disruptive and self-serving policies such as quota system that kills meritocracy and creation of  more LGAs for the north without objective criteria beyond cornering resources of more productive members of the union.

 That the north at the beginning was not as economically endowed as the south, the major incentive for the 1914 British amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates was a settled issue. But there is no evidence that Ahmadu Bello and his northern political elite opposed revenue allocation based on derivation all through the constitutional debate leading to independence. Instead, he went on to supervise the groundnut pyramids, the sources of revenue for building the biggest business conglomerate in Africa as well as other infrastructures including roads, Ahmadu Bello Stadium and Ahmadu Bello University and was still able to provide security for the whole of the north.

The rain started to beat us after the civil war with the emergence of northern soldiers of fortune and self-serving northern politicians who found Bello’s shoe too big. Murtala Muhammed destroyed the academia and bureaucracy without which a nation decays; Shehu Shagari smoked while his NPN wrecked the economic ship of state despite Awo’s warning it was heading for the rocks. Babangida destroyed our budding industries by opening our nation to importation of goods from Europe and its satellite nations. He manipulated the religion sensibilities of the north by illegally taking the country into OIC. Abacha who according to Alli Mazrui was too unintelligent to know fears, stole the country blind while he waged a five-year war against Nigeria’s pro-democracy groups. Abdulsalami Abubakar authored the 1999 constitution derisively referred re to as ‘Decree 24’ by Nigerians. Finally, Buhari, caged by Fulani ethnic irredentists left the country more divided than he met it.

But it is not getting better with only 33% of Boko Haram infested Bornu in school, 70% of Nigerian out-of-school children from the north and with a large expanse of ungoverned territories spanning over 200 kilometres from Kaduna to Zamfara.

The question those who care about our country are asking is whether the northern leaders including NEF, Gowon, Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, herders’ patron such as Lamido Sanusi Lamido, are aware of these ungoverned territories. And if they are, why did they not rein in Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders’ Association before they carried out their threat to make Nigeria ungovernable unless they were given license for open grazing in places like Rivers, Ekiti, Ondo and Oyo?

Why would they not persuade those who killed and confiscated their victims’ land to relocate to Kano following ex-governor, Abdullahi Ganduje’s undertaking to rehabilitate all herdsmen in Kano?  There was similarly not a whimper from northern elders as the battle line over attempt to export armed killer herdsmen from north’s ungoverned territories to Ondo’s reserved forest over which daggers were drawn between President Buhari’s ‘loyal gate keepers’ and the late Governor Akeredolu of Ondo.

Northern leaders not only betrayed Ahmadu Bello, their illustrious forbearer, they remain the nation’s cancer.

The measures introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to rescue the naira have triggered volatility among currency dealers.

A survey yesterday by The Nation showed that inconsistent pricing and cautious optimism characterised the parallel market in Lagos and Abuja where traders grappled with the implications of the apex bank policies.

The triggers are the reduction of dollar sales to Bureau De Change operators from $20,000 by half and the hike in interest rate by the apex bank to 24.75 per cent from 22.75 per cent at the 294th Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting on Tuesday.

According to a CBN circular released on Monday, BDC operators will as from today, be able to buy $10,000 worth of forex at N1, 251 per dollar as against the $20,000 allocation and N1, 301 per dollar rate offered last month.

It was confusion for potential forex buyers yesterday at Wuse Zone 4, a major foreign exchange hub in Abuja, as currency traders offered the dollar at varying rates. Some quoted N1, 250 per dollar and others offered to sell as high as N1, 330 per dollar. The inconsistency created uncertainty for those seeking to exchange the naira for the dollar.

But despite the price disparity, there was a general consensus among traders that holders of foreign currencies were cautiously selling their holdings.

The measured approach suggests a wait-and-see attitude, where market participants gauge the long-term impact of the CBN’s actions.

Traders at the parallel market remain unconvinced that the dollar price will experience a significant drop in the days ahead.

The Nation learnt that the apex bank’s decision to sell $10,000 to BDC operators at N1, 251 per dollar with a 1.5 per cent spread is viewed with skepticism.

Many believe that the price point may not be enough to entice a substantial downward movement in the parallel market.

The MPC decision to raise the interest rate benchmark has instilled a sense of panic in the parallel market with traders anticipating an influx of portfolio investors seeking to capitalize on the higher interest rates offered on naira-denominated assets.

The potential inflow of foreign exchange could theoretically lead to a decrease in the dollar price.

Many forex dealers in Lagos turned down requests by ambitious sellers – mainly speculators – insisting on old dollar rates despite appreciation of the naira against dollar.

At the Central Business District (CBD), in Marina, Lagos, the naira exchanged at N1, 300 per dollar (a N34 appreciation from N1, 334 it exchanged on Tuesday).

Many speculators, who had recorded heavy losses, were forced to sell at the new rate after initial hesitation.

Hassan Abdul, a BDC trader in Central Lagos, said the naira was trading at N1,300 per dollar around 12 noon, and sustained the rally till the close of business yesterday.

He said: “Many currency dealers, who bought on Monday when the rate was higher, were initially not ready to absorb high level of losses based on today’s rates. But they sensed that delay meant more losses, and decided to offload at the new rate.  The improved liquidity in the market makes it even more risky for those holding back dollars,” he said.

Another forex dealer, Abiodun Mohammed, blamed the losses at the parallel market on the CBN policies.

He He said: “The new policies, especially the discounts given to bureau de change operators drastically reduced the rates of the dollar against naira. Many of us that bought when the dollar was high are recording major losses. But, we understand the risks involved in the business”.

Mohammed said he will slow down new purchases to avoid further losses.

“The risk in this business is too high at the moment. I have to slow down until the rates settle at a more market-friendly rate,” he said.

Naira will continue to stabilize, says Shettima

Vice President Kashim Shettima has assured that the naira will continue to stabilise in the coming weeks and months.

Shettima gave the assurance at the inauguration of the National Design and Innovation Competition organised by the Interior Designers Association of Nigeria (IDAN) at the Presidential Villa in Abuja yesterday.

[TheNation]

From the description of the VIP treatment given the two Binance executives abducted by the Nigerian government in a Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz-Carlton style, one gets the impression that they did not think their tactic through. They detained the men (Nadeem Anjarwalla and Tigran Gambaryan) deemed economic sabotages, still allowed them several privileges, somehow forgot to put them on a watch list, and one of them managed to escape. Nigeria’s handling of the Binance affair suggests that their detention and proposed trial were half-hearted. So desperate was the government to find a scapegoat that they invited Binance officials, detained them, and demanded $10bn from their employers.

The government alleges that some unscrupulous elements use Binance for money laundering, terrorist financing, currency speculation and market manipulation, thus distorting the Nigerian economy and weakening the Naira against other currencies. Nigeria also accused them of offering taxable services without remitting taxes to the country. The government said over $21.6bn was traded by Nigerians whose identities were concealed by Binance. These accusations are grievous, and I agree that they should be addressed. However, it was foolish to arrest, detain the Binance officials, and demand money. Even the bandits that abduct schoolchildren for a living are far more tactical. By doing that, Nigeria overplayed its hand.

People like to come up with how the United States similarly extracted $4.3bn from Binance to justify the detention of Anjarwalla and Gambaryan, but seem to forget that the US—despite the leverage it has over Binance since the country is their major market— did not resort to abducting company officials and demanding payment. They spent years piling up evidence and going to court. Their prosecutors demonstrated that Binance violated federal anti-money laundering and sanctions laws through lapses in its internal controls. They failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions involving designated terrorist groups including Hamas, al Qaeda, and ISIS. Prosecutors also alleged that Binance’s platform supported the sale of child sexual abuse materials and was among the largest recipients of ransomware proceeds.

Nigeria has relatively little leverage over transnational corporations like the US does, and we would have done far better by addressing the situation through the instrument of the law, diplomacy, policies, technical expertise, and moral suasions. If Binance has not been remitting taxes to Nigeria, we should create a policy framework and technical structure that facilitates it. The fact that they sent two of their workers to Nigeria suggests good faith on their part. We should have worked hand in hand with the company to resolve the issues raised.

But trust Nigerian officials. They like gragra. Thinking through situations can be too tasking for them, so they quickly resort to the sole weapon of their warfare: force. Everything must be remedied through a blatant show of force. What exactly did they think they would achieve by abducting two Binance officials and demanding $10bn?

Think about it: if you were the CEO of Binance and asked to give up information regarding transactions worth $21.6bn in exchange for two company officials, would you? You would consider that paying the ransom might not secure your company officials. Besides, if you allowed yourself to be blackmailed, what would stop other broke countries and individuals from seizing your officials and demanding payment you respond? So, how should you respond?

Well, you will first disconnect the men’s access to any of the company’s operating systems so that they will have no means of giving up valuable information, even under duress. You will make the necessary diplomatic and legal moves to get your officials released, but you will also steady yourself to wait out Nigeria. What you will not do is hand over money or information to the abductor.  Even if those men die in Nigerian custody, it would still be far cheaper to pay their families some compensation than to yield grounds. Even if you pay their families N100m each, it is still not up to one per cent of the sum at stake.

I listened to a television interview where a talking head said Nigeria should extradite Anjarwalla. Why keep escalating errors? It was bad enough that Nigeria started what it had no idea how to finish, it is imprudent to keep expending resources over inanity. Did anyone study the company organogram to determine that these “executives” are central to decision-making in Binance to the point that taking them hostage ever made sense? Even now, it is more than likely that their job with Binance has been terminated. If an abducted employee manages to return in a dramatic escape, you would rightly wonder if it were not a ploy by the abductors to get access to the company by other means. In case the abducted had been brainwashed, you would either place him on an administrative leave or pay him a severance pay. Of what use would further pursuing Anjarwalla be to Nigeria?

The trouble with the Binance affair is the Nigerian tendency to blame spurious factors for its economic woes. Nigeria vs. Binance is a recrudescence of that time when CBN governor Godwin Emefiele blamed abokifx—a website that reports exchange rate figures—for tanking the national currency. I thought that had to be one of the most thoughtless moves ever in the history of national banking until the present administration repeated it with Binance. At some point, they started arresting BDC owners for driving up forex through their speculative activities. There was also a time when the Emefiele clown also blamed the Nigerians who collected Business Travel Allowance and ended up not travelling abroad for driving up the exchange rate. Everything, except the real issues of our mono-economy as administered by our perennially visionless leaders, is to be blamed.

It does not seem these people think through the implication of blaming national woes on singular entities. Not only do you display imprudence by thusly broadcasting your vulnerability, but you also give yourself away as inept and lacking the capability to think through situations other countries face but choose to approach with reasonable solutions.

The Binance charade is another misstep by Nigerian leaders dealing with transnational corporations in the age of the internet. We are so wired into demonstrating forcefulness on issues that require rational judgment that we seem to forget that our local gragra ways go nowhere on the international market. Unlike our local cases where a tomato review gets a poor woman arrested, global capitalism is complex and cannot brook the puerility of the Nigerian extrajudicial methods. We did the same unsophisticated thing with the then Twitter (now X). We even inaugurated a committee of old men to go to Silicon Valley to negotiate with Twitter, but what came out of it? Twitter comfortably neglected Nigeria and their share price did not even drop. They proved that the Nigerian market is negligible in the global scheme of things. Binance too had no problem barring Nigerians from its app and that in itself is quite telling. If we were a profitable market, they would not have walked away from us so easily.

I hope the incident teaches our aged leaders who like to make a show of how much they support youths, digital economy, and global technology that the world is no longer what they know it to be. The internet has changed the world in such drastic ways that countries like Nigeria where lawmakers debate social media regulations waste their time. To succeed in the new world being unfolded, you must drop gragra tactics and commit to learning so you can propose reasonable solutions.

As for Gambaryan, they should let him go his way. That these men were labelled “executives” and sent to Africa does not mean they have any real power in the corporation. Even if you abduct their CEO for $10bn, you will be surprised how the company board of shareholders will rather give him up than give up money. Binance trades capital, not sentiments.