FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in Bahamas after U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges

Credit : Dimsum Daily (Hong Kong) -

11:41AM Tue December 13, 202

13th December 2022 – (Nassau) Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday after U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges.

His arrest is the first concrete move by regulators to hold individuals accountable for the multibillion-dollar implosion of FTX last month.

“S.B.F.’s [Sam Bankman-Fried] arrest followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against S.B.F. and is likely to request his extradition,” the government of the Bahamas said in a statement.

Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that the federal government anticipated moving to “unseal the indictment in the morning.” The charges include wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering, according to the New York Times, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated a separate set of charges against Bankman-Fried, relating to “violations of our securities laws, which will be filed publicly tomorrow in the Southern District of New York,” enforcement director Gurbir Grewal said in a statement.

The arrest was the latest stunning development in one of the most dramatic falls from grace in recent corporate history. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, was scheduled to testify in Congress on Tuesday about the collapse of FTX, which was one of the most powerful firms in the emerging crypto industry until it imploded virtually overnight last month after a run on deposits exposed an $8 billion hole in its accounts.

Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York confirmed that Mr. Bankman-Fried had been charged and said an indictment would be unsealed on Tuesday. Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement that it had authorized charges “relating to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s violations of our securities laws.”

In a statement, Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”

“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere,” continued the statement. The criminal charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried included wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Bankman-Fried, who was the only person charged in the indictment, was taken into custody by the Bahamian authorities, the person said. He was arrested shortly after 6pm at his apartment complex in the Albany resort in the Bahamas, according to a statement from the Bahamian police. The timing of when Mr. Bankman-Fried might be moved to the United States was unclear. While the Bahamas has an extradition treaty with the United States, the process can take weeks, and sometimes far longer if a criminal defendant contests it.

Mr. Bankman-Fried was cooperative during the arrest, according to a person familiar with the matter, and will be held overnight in a cell at a police station. He is scheduled to appear on Tuesday in Magistrate Court in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas.

A spokesman for Mr. Bankman-Fried declined to comment. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, also declined to comment.

Lawyers involved in the case expressed surprise at the suddenness of the arrest. Mr. Bankman-Fried had been widely expected to face a criminal indictment. But complex white-collar fraud cases can take months to build. Until the arrest, Mr. Bankman-Fried was slated to testify remotely about the FTX collapse in a hearing in front of the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday. The hearing is still set to go ahead, just without Mr. Bankman-Fried’s testimony.

“The American public deserves to hear directly from Mr. Bankman-Fried about the actions that’ve harmed over one million people,” Representative Maxine Waters, who chairs the committee, said in a statement. “The public has been waiting eagerly to get these answers under oath before Congress, and the timing of this arrest denies the public this opportunity.”

Several people familiar with the investigation said the speed with which the authorities moved in filing criminal and civil charges was an indication that prosecutors and regulators had received information from cooperating witnesses.

Mr. Bankman-Fried has been facing scrutiny from dozens of regulators across the world, including the Justice Department, the S.E.C. and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Prosecutors in Manhattan have been examining whether FTX broke the law by transferring billions in customer funds to Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund that Mr. Bankman-Fried also founded and owned.

They have also focused on whether Mr. Bankman-Fried and his hedge fund engaged in market manipulation that may have helped cause the failure of two prominent cryptocurrencies last spring.

Ever since FTX collapsed, the S.E.C. and federal prosecutors have moved quickly with requests for documents from various parties, including some of the big financial firms that invested up to $2 billion in the crypto exchange beginning last year, said two people briefed on the matter.

It is unclear whether the federal authorities are looking at charging anyone else in connection with the collapse of FTX. It is not uncommon for an S.E.C. civil complaint to reveal more information about the events that led to the filing of charges than an indictment.

FTX’s collapse began early last month, when a run on deposits revealed an $8 billion hole in the company’s finances. Mr. Bankman-Fried sought a lifeline from a rival company, the giant crypto exchange Binance, but the deal fell through after Binance examined FTX’s books.

Mr. Bankman-Fried quickly became a villain in the crypto industry. Hundreds of thousands of customers have funds trapped on FTX, with little prospect of getting them back anytime soon.

Surprisingly for an executive facing criminal investigations, Mr. Bankman-Fried had given numerous media interviews in the wake of FTX’s collapse. At the recent DealBook Summit, a New York Times event, he blamed “huge management failures” and sloppy accounting for his company’s implosion, insisting that he “did not ever try to commit fraud” or knowingly dip into the funds of FTX customers to finance other investments.

When FTX filed for bankruptcy, Mr. Bankman-Fried stepped down as chief executive. He was replaced by John Ray, a seasoned corporate turnaround expert who oversaw the unwinding of the energy trading company Enron after an accounting scandal in 2001.

In a bankruptcy filing last month, Mr. Ray said that the management of FTX reflected a “complete failure of corporate control.”

Mr. Ray was also scheduled to testify to the House on Tuesday. In a prepared statement, he said FTX had been a mess.

The collapse stemmed “from the absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals,” he wrote.

Ray is also scheduled to testify before Congress this week. In prepared remarks released Monday, Ray said that FTX went on a “spending binge” from late 2021 through 2022, when approximately ”$5 billion was spent buying a myriad of businesses and investments, many of which may be worth only a fraction of what was paid for them,” and that the firm made more than $1 billion in “loans and other payments…to insiders.”

Ray also confirmed media reports that FTX customer funds were commingled with assets from Alameda Research. Alameda used client funds to do margin trading, which exposed them to massive losses, Ray said.