The fresh reporting on Babak Zanjani’s network this week dropped the receipts Main Street Independent has been tracking for months. A man Binance itself classified a “high-value customer” — entitled to lower fees and a personal account manager — turned out to be the operational hub for Zanjani’s $850 million sanctions-evasion pipeline for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The exchange’s own eighty-page internal report, prepared in April for the United Arab Emirates’ financial intelligence unit, describes the network in detail. The fact that the report exists at all is the admission.
The man’s name is Sukhrob Oimakhmadov. He managed a Dubai diamond vendor run by Zanjani’s sister. His Binance account received more than $10 million from wallets Israel’s Defense Ministry later identified as IRGC-controlled. He passed the funds along to other IRGC-linked wallets. When Israeli intelligence named those wallets in September 2025, Binance’s investigators asked Oimakhmadov to explain. He said the money was for a daughter abroad. Then he said it was for face-to-face purchases of African diamonds. He had no documentation for the diamonds.
Binance’s response, per its own report: the company kept him on as a client for years while “applying a risk-based approach” — consultant-speak for “we knew, and we kept the fees flowing.” Internal investigators who flagged the activity needed senior approval just to remove him. Removal didn’t come until October 2025, with final offboarding this May — a full year after the exchange had already pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering and sanctions charges in 2023. The pattern is the story.
Binance took the 2023 guilty plea. Changpeng Zhao served four months. President Trump pardoned him last October. Within months, per the internal records reviewed by the press, the same VIP-tier infrastructure that prosecutors had already said was hijacked by illicit finance was being used by the regime’s premier moneyman. The pardon didn’t rehabilitate a clean institution. It green-lit a live one.
Follow the investigator thread in the April document. The Oimakhmadov account led to Zedcex, a “London-based” crypto firm that Binance’s own systems detected being accessed from Tehran over a dozen times between late 2024 and late 2025. The Zedcex corporate account moved nearly $830 million on its own, including $56 million directly to wallets Israel tied to the IRGC. The account held a custom Binance interface letting Zedcex customers log in to Binance through Zedcex’s website — meaning the user-facing product was, functionally, a sanctions-evasion front with a customer-service layer bolted on.
Then came ZedPay, a Turkish payment app advertising partnerships with Turkish banks. Israeli officials say its job was converting Iranian oil proceeds into cryptocurrency outside the traditional banking system. The CEO’s personal Binance account linked to ten accounts belonging to his employees and associates. Treasury sanctioned ZedPay, the CEO, Oimakhmadov, and Zanjani’s sister and romantic partner this July.
The clean read on this story will be: bad actors exploited gaps, the gaps got closed, the system held. That read collapses on contact with the internal report. The investigators themselves wrote that “the user’s activities pose a significant risk to Binance’s compliance” and filed an “escalation document” warning of “the urgent need for enhanced risk mitigation strategies at Binance.” They were not describing a one-off failure. They were describing an institution that needed seniority-gated sign-off to fire its own most profitable clients.
The September DOJ indictment of Binance clients routing Iran’s oil money through a crypto network tracks the same architecture. The Senate’s late-September finding that Iran leaned on Tether’s stablecoin to bypass sanctions tracks the same operator playbook. Three stories, three angles, one infrastructure.
The exchange’s spokesperson called any suggestion that “total account trading volume equals funds that reached the IRGC” misleading. Technically defensible. Substantively irrelevant. The VIP tier is the function. Lower fees and a personal account manager were the reason Zanjani’s network set up shop on Binance instead of routing the money through smaller venues that don’t have a celebrity founder waiting for a presidential pardon. The tier made the activity profitable for the exchange and untouchable for compliance. That isn’t a loophole. That is the business model.
The interesting policy question is not whether Binance can plug this hole. It cannot, because the hole is the product. The question is whether the next pardon, the next guilty plea, and the next eighty-page internal report follow the same script — or whether someone in Washington bothers to read this one before it shows up in the next one.