Sam Bankman-Fried had been extradited from the Bahamas on Wednesday evening.
Founder and former boss of FTX cryptocurrency exchange platform Sam Bankman-Fried arrived in New York on the evening of Wednesday, December 21. A few hours later, a New York federal judge agreed Thursday to release him, subject to the payment of a monster bail of 250 million dollars.
Indicted in particular for fraud and criminal association, “SBF”, his nickname, had been extradited from the Bahamas on Wednesday evening after having given up contesting his surrender to the American authorities. “SBF will be conducted directly in the Southern District of (State of) New York“, a jurisdiction that includes Manhattan, “and he will be presented to a judge as soon as possibleManhattan Federal Prosecutor Damian Williams announced earlier in a video posted to Twitter.
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Earlier Wednesday, Sam Bankman-Fried agreed to be extradited to the United States during a hearing in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. At the hearing, he expressed his “desire to ensure affected customers get their money back“, according to wall street journal. The Manhattan federal prosecutor also said Wednesday that two key figures in the case had been charged. The latter have pleaded guilty and are collaborating with the government, which means that they could incriminate Sam Bankman-Fried.
They are Caroline Ellison, former boss of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, charged “in connection with their role in the fraud that contributed to the collapse of FTX“said Damian Williams, without giving more details. According to wall street journalboth were charged with fraud, while only Caroline Ellison was charged with criminal association.
Alameda Research is the company that Sam Bankman-Fried used, according to the indictment, to carry out risky transactions with billions of dollars in funds deposited by clients on the FTX platform, without their being aware of it informed. Since the bankruptcy of FTX on November 11, Sam Bankman-Fried has repeatedly argued publicly that he had not been at the helm of Alameda Research for several months, indirectly incriminating Caroline Ellison. An argument disputed by the public prosecutor, who asserts that “SBFremained the primary decision maker at Alameda until FTX filed for bankruptcy.
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A whole life in prison?
Arrested on December 12 in Nassau, Sam Bankman-Fried was already in detention in the Bahamas. He is also suspected of investing some of the money in real estate in the Bahamas. He is also accused of having made donations to Democratic politicians – always from funds from FTX clients -, including Joe Biden during his presidential campaign.
Five of the eight charges against him each provide for a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. The one who has long been seen as an iconoclastic genius of cryptocurrencies is therefore likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang have also been summoned to civil justice by the two main American financial market regulators, the SEC and the CFTC. They pledged to cooperate with the SEC, and acknowledged the facts attributed to them by the CFTC, which should earn them, in both cases, a more lenient judgment. The CFTC estimates the total amount of funds misappropriated from FTX client accounts to be $8 billion.