Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams has accused him of diverting funds from FTX clients, but also wire fraud, securities and commodities fraud, and money laundering.
Danielle Sassoon, an attorney for the prosecution, told a hearing that the number of victims of Sam Bankman-Fried’s alleged actions could be “in excess of a million”.
POINTING FINGERS
Charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, SBF, as Bankman-Fried is known, was extradited at the end of December from the Bahamas, where FTX was headquartered, and released on a US$250 million bail upon his arrival in New York.
Pending the trial, Bankman-Fried was placed under house arrest at the Silicon Valley home of his parents, both professors at Stanford University.
But US District Judge Lewis Kaplan rescinded that decision, ordering Bankman-Fried behind bars over alleged attempts of witness intimidation.
According to prosecutors, while holed up at his parent’s home, Bankman-Fried passed on documents to the New York Times in an attempt to influence the testimony of Caroline Ellison, his ex-girlfriend and a former Alameda executive.
She has also been indicted in the case and has agreed to cooperate with the US authorities, along with three other former executives.
They are expected to take the stand in his six-week trial – where Bankman-Fried will likely admit egregious management errors but no wrongdoing, and point the finger at Ellison.
“If the prosecutors can do a good job explaining that people invested money, the fact that it’s crypto won’t really make a difference,” said Julia Jayne, a California lawyer specialising in white-collar crime.
A long blog post that Bankman-Fried had planned to publish on the social network X, published by the Times before he was taken into custody, offered clues to his defence strategy.
In it, he presents himself, as he has done in the past, as an overworked boss – unable to rely on his incompetent or disinterested teams – who let himself be overtaken by outside circumstances.
Source: CNA
