Christine Lagarde personally asked Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to block Binance\u2019s bid for a license to operate across the European Union, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the discussions.<\/p>\n
The intervention came after Greek regulators had all but signed off on the application, raising an obvious question about how much sway the ECB president can exert over a process she has no formal authority over.<\/p>\n
Binance had applied through Greece\u2019s Hellenic Capital Market Commission (HCMC) for a license under the EU\u2019s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, the kind of approval that, once granted by one country, covers the entire bloc.<\/p>\n
By early June, the application had cleared its technical review. The mandatory 40-day assessment period ended without objections, the HCMC\u2019s anti-money laundering officer had signed off favorably, and notifications to other member states were reportedly already being prepared.<\/p>\n
Then, sometime between June 7 and June 15, that changed. An HCMC official later told Binance that Lagarde opposed the license, and the Journal reported<\/a> she had signaled as much to Mitsotakis directly during a May meeting, a position that overrode Greece\u2019s own finance minister.<\/p>\n Some of that willingness to go along, the report suggested, may have had as much to do with Greek election timing as Binance\u2019s case itself.<\/p>\n Her stated reasoning traced back to two things: Binance\u2019s earlier guilty plea to US money laundering and sanctions violations, and a fear that letting the exchange into Europe would push more people toward dollar stablecoins right as the ECB was trying to get its own digital euro off the ground.<\/p>\n One legal expert described the episode as \u201cpolitical interference\u201d in a licensing decision that legally belongs to an independent national regulator, since the ECB has no formal say over MiCA approvals at all.<\/p>\n Reuters first surfaced the Greek rejection risk in mid-June, and Binance pushed back<\/a> hard at the time, insisting that HCMC\u2019s review had found its application compliant and pointing to a compliance team that has grown to roughly 1,500 people since its 2023 US settlement.<\/p>\n That pushback did not hold. The firm later issued a statement indicating that it had decided to stop<\/a> the license application process in Greece and was looking for authorization from other member states.<\/p>\n According to reports at the time, regulators in Ireland and Latvia had also turned the exchange down<\/a>, citing its past penalties and complex structure.<\/p>\n Coinbase had already picked Luxembourg as its home base, and Kraken already held EU approval, with Binance leaning on France, where it holds a smaller registration and is in talks with the country\u2019s financial markets regulator, Autorit\u00e9 des March\u00e9s Financiers (AMF), as its remaining shot at a MiCA license covering all 27 member states.<\/p>\n The post Report: ECB President Personally Blocked Binance\u2019s EU License<\/a> appeared first on CryptoPotato<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christine Lagarde personally asked Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to block Binance\u2019s bid for a license to operate across the European Union, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the discussions. The intervention came after Greek regulators had all but signed off on the application, raising an obvious question about how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229358"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=229358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Retreat That Ended in France<\/h2>\n