Greece’s own finance minister reportedly had a different read on the case, a view that did not survive the ECB president’s intervention.
Christine Lagarde personally asked Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to block Binance’s 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 much sway the ECB president can exert over a process she has no formal authority over.
What Lagarde Reportedly Knew, and When She Acted
Binance had applied through Greece’s Hellenic Capital Market Commission (HCMC) for a license under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, the kind of approval that, once granted by one country, covers the entire bloc.
By early June, the application had cleared its technical review. The mandatory 40-day assessment period ended without objections, the HCMC’s anti-money laundering officer had signed off favorably, and notifications to other member states were reportedly already being prepared.
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 she had signaled as much to Mitsotakis directly during a May meeting, a position that overrode Greece’s own finance minister.
Some of that willingness to go along, the report suggested, may have had as much to do with Greek election timing as Binance’s case itself.
Her stated reasoning traced back to two things: Binance’s 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.
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One legal expert described the episode as “political interference” in a licensing decision that legally belongs to an independent national regulator, since the ECB has no formal say over MiCA approvals at all.
A Retreat That Ended in France
Reuters first surfaced the Greek rejection risk in mid-June, and Binance pushed back hard at the time, insisting that HCMC’s 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.
That pushback did not hold. The firm later issued a statement indicating that it had decided to stop the license application process in Greece and was looking for authorization from other member states.
According to reports at the time, regulators in Ireland and Latvia had also turned the exchange down, citing its past penalties and complex structure.
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’s financial markets regulator, Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), as its remaining shot at a MiCA license covering all 27 member states.