Maya Parbhoe, a presidential candidate for the South American nation of Suriname, has an ambitious vision: To build a Bitcoin nation even more deeply rooted in crypto than Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador.
Parbhoe, who is also CEO of Bitcoin and NOSTR-based services firm Daedalus Labs, has outlined a bold plan to fight corruption and deliver tangible benefits to citizens through the adoption of a Bitcoin standard — that is, if she wins the forthcoming 2025 elections.
Her top priority is to make Bitcoin (BTC) legal tender once she takes office. Within the first year, she would gradually replace the Suriname dollar with sats and ensure all salaries are paid in BTC.
Her plan for Suriname extends well beyond making Bitcoin legal tender, including dismantling the central bank, cutting taxes, privatizing public services, issuing national Bitcoin bonds and pursuing widespread deregulation.
While many politicians have only recently jumped on the crypto bandwagon, Parbhoe has been involved in Bitcoin for the last decade.
The presidential hopeful told Cointelegraph that she was always interested in technology, a curiosity inherited from her father. She said she was obsessed with tech stocks and the Dot.com markets when she was a child.
In 2014, her curiosity brought her to crypto, where she began engaging in a Telegram group called Whale Pool and attended several crypto conferences.
“I completely dove into the rabbit hole and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to it. If there’s a cause that you could literally die on this hill for, Bitcoin would be it.”
Parbhoe began to study the functioning of the global financial markets. To her surprise, she discovered how weak or non-existent Suriname’s financial infrastructure was.
Source: Maya Parbhoe
According to Parbhoe, the Central Bank of Suriname and the commercial banks used a simple Excel sheet to determine the exchange rate. Additionally, capital markets were nonexistent, hindering Suriname’s economic growth.
Parbhoe saw an opportunity to set up a financial infrastructure from scratch without going through the same mistakes as the fiat system.
“We need to build an alternative where we don’t replicate the same issues that created this mess in the first place, but build on top of what Satoshi Nakamoto started and build a new system.”
Parbhoe also sees Bitcoin as a way to address Suriname’s rampant corruption, something she and her family suffered firsthand when her father was murdered — allegedly by a hitman — amid a national scandal.
Maya Parbhoe’s tragic experience with corruption
Parbhoe’s burning motivation to tackle corruption began when her father, Winod Parbhoe, was murdered in a drive-by shooting when Maya was 13 years old.
The tragedy took place shortly after he blew the whistle to several authorities, including the CIA, that millions of US dollars were being funneled to bank accounts at BNY Mellon through De Surinaamsche Bank (DSB), the largest bank in Suriname. The funds were allegedly used to finance the Colombian guerrilla group FARC.
Maya Parbhoe with her father, Winod Parbhoe. Source: Maya Parbhoe
The booming casino business in Suriname has long been suspected of having money laundering links to the South American drug trade.
Winod had partnered with Australian businessman Dallas Dempster to establish a casino in Suriname. He discovered that New Zealander Jeffrey Clague, the casino’s local manager, was channeling funds through their casino accounts in DSB to Dempster’s Miami-registered CCA companies, allegedly for money laundering.
According to Parbhoe, Clague was funneling funds to Sarkis Soghanalian, the infamous arms dealer dubbed the “merchant of death,” who was notorious for supplying weapons to rebels in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Colombia and other conflict zones.
The deaths of Parbhoe’s father and his lawyer Eddy Bruma, who was killed a year earlier, are among the biggest unsolved corruption-related cases in Suriname.
Surinamese prosecutors led a major lawsuit against DSB and its director, Sigmund Proeve, and seized the bank’s assets related to the case. Although the bank was initially convicted, the ruling was overturned on appeal.
Winod’s death came with another dramatic event: the loss of the family’s finances. Family assets from the casino business were systematically seized as they were entangled in the corruption case.
Parbhoe and her mother went from wealthy to broke. According to Parbhoe, an independent investigation later confirmed that $16.4 million had been siphoned from their accounts.
On June 11, 2024, the court ruled that Parbhoe and her mother had no claim to the funds. Parbhoe claims the judge was bought off. They have appealed the decision, but it could take many years, and she doesn’t trust that the new judges appointed to the case aren’t themselves corrupt.
Parbhoe says Suriname can undergo a radical transformation by eradicating corruption, drawing inspiration from Nayib Bukele’s success in turning El Salvador from the world’s murder capital into a nation free from widespread crime.
She says she can implement similar radical changes in Suriname, leveraging the power of Bitcoin to bring transparency in government budgets to help dismantle systematic corruption in the country.
For Parbhoe, Bitcoin is not just a financial tool but a critical means of creating a transparent, accountable governance system that could pave the way for Suriname’s revitalization.
Parbhoe has worked closely with Surinamese politicians for the last six years through her various local business ventures.
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Still, she had never considered entering politics until Samson Mow encouraged her to run for president.
Mow is CEO of the Bitcoin accelerator Jan3, which played a crucial role in El Salvador’s Bitcoin transformation.
Mow’s suggestion followed their joint effort in November 2023 to make Bitcoin legal tender in Suriname, which came close to succeeding.
Establishing a Bitcoin standard
On May 18, 2023, Parbhoe and Mow met at the Miami Bitcoin Conference, where she pitched Suriname as the next potential country to follow the path of El Salvador. In the following months, Parbhoe connected Mow’s team with key figures that could help make Bitcoin legal tender in the country.
After several “very positive” meetings, they’d made significant progress. Suriname President Chan Santokhi told them he wanted to follow the example of Bukele in El Salvador and recognize Bitcoin as legal tender.
From left: Samson Mow, President Chan Santokhi, Maya Parbhoe and Ben Van Hool. Source: Jan3
Mow and Parbhoe had a one-page proposal prepared to make Bitcoin legal tender through an executive order by the Foreign Exchange Commission. The order wouldn’t have needed passage by Parliament.
Still, Santokhi said he would first need to check this with his adviser Paul Mehilal, owner of IT consultant Qualogy and chairman of E-gov, the government’s digital platform responsible for developing IT policies.
Parbhoe said that Mehilal directly asked her for a bribe in exchange for his endorsement of the Bitcoin legal tender proposal and even suggested she take a cut as well.
“Mehilal asked, if I help Samson, what’s in it for me? He also asked me, what I was getting out of it? He advised me to make sure that I get a cut out of it or monetary compensation.”
Mehilal also told Parbhoe about his large-scale, undercover Bitcoin mining operation in Suriname’s Paranam district, in which he claimed to have invested $20 million to extend its capacity to 10 megawatts — a significant portion of the country’s energy supply, according to Parbhoe.
Mehilal wanted to keep Bitcoin out of the spotlight in Suriname, fearing it could attract unwanted scrutiny to his mining activities. Parbhoe said she realized that to protect his personal interests, Mehilal would likely advise the president against making Bitcoin legal tender.
Several months went by with no action from Santokhi’s administration.
Parbhoe became frustrated and decided to go on record on Suriname’s largest podcast from Dave van Aerde to disclose how corruption was blocking the possibility of Suriname adopting Bitcoin as legal tender.
After the podcast, she began receiving what appeared to be evidence of Mehilal’s crypto-mining operation, showing unusually high electricity usage linked to an IT consultancy based in Suriname.
Parbhoe shared with Cointelegraph a Feb. 2024 electricity bill from Qualogy Carribean, Mehilal’s IT consultancy firm, which has over 90 employees according to its website. The monthly bill shows a staggering monthly expense of 3.5 million Surinamese dollars (SRD), about $100,000 US dollars (USD), in electricity usage.
Electricity energy monthly bill from Qualogy of $3,5 SRD (Approx. $100,000 USD) Source: Maya Parbhoe
On May 3, 2024, the incident erupted in Parliament as National Democratic Party (NDP) leader Rabin Parmessar demanded the government provide clarity over the huge amounts of electricity delivered by the state-owned electric grid to the Bitcoin mining facility.
Parmessar presented electric bills that demonstrated a consumption of over 4.5 megawatts in a two-month period. The NDP’s Melvin Bouva said these amounts of energy could supply at least 12,000 households.
Qualogy Caribbean dismissed any relation to the Bitcoin mining facility, claiming that it was an independent endeavor by Mehilal. Despite the commotion, Attorney General Paragsingh and other prosecutors didn’t pursue an investigation.
Cointelegraph reached out to Mehilal for comment but did not receive a response.
Parbhoe says Paragsingh is “in the president’s pocket,” which discouraged her from taking further action. According to Parbhoe, corruption in Suriname is deeply rooted, asserting that “no corruption case gets prosecuted” and further alleging that the “president is funded by cartels.”
Parbhoe has received backlash and even death threats because of her statements.
The possibility of Suriname making Bitcoin legal tender seemed to have vanished until Mow recommended that Parbhoe run for president.
It took several months for Parbhoe to decide to get into politics, as it could mean the end of her private life and the freedoms that come with it. Still, she eventually decided to take the plunge.
“When I uncovered this corruption is when I decided I’m fucking going for it! It’s 2025, one man, one vote.”
In 2023, Suriname changed its electoral system so each citizen’s vote would weigh the same. Under the previous system, candidates in Paramaribo, the largest constituency at the time, required over 7,000 votes to secure a parliamentary seat. In contrast, candidates in Coronie, the smallest constituency, needed only 300 votes to be elected.
Parbhoe said the old system enabled electoral fraud and made it difficult for a new political party or leader to win an election. The one-person, one-vote system may provide Parbhoe a path to the presidency.
Parbhoe shared that her main motivation is to eliminate the chronic corruption she’s seen in the Central Bank, financial sector and commercial banks, adding that corruption exists in “every field in the industry in the country.”
“Corruption is ruining this country and preventing billions of dollars from investment coming in, hampering development.”
Parbhoe says Satoshi Nakamoto “laid the foundation with Bitcoin, for money to be separated from the state,” making it impossible to manipulate the base layer as “everything is transparent.”
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If the national economy were based on Bitcoin, the governmental budget would be transparent and traceable, and “we would become an open=source government.”
She also wants to create “a corruption bounty program so any person in the world could find corruption in the system and receive a reward for reporting it.”
Parbhoe’s vision has garnered significant support from the Bitcoin community, offering a glimmer of hope in her fight against systemic corruption. Only time will tell whether the momentum she’s building will be enough to reshape the country’s future.
