The prosecution’s case against FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is getting clearer

Federal prosecutors have shared more information about their case against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Between two new indictments and civil lawsuits against another former FTX manager, we now have a much clearer picture of what the Ministry of Justice thinks it has.

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Bankman-Fried goes to trial in seven months. Attorneys for both the prosecution and his defense team are still working on discovery, but the latest indictments and lawsuits against him and Singh shed much more light on the case against Bankman-Fried than his original indictment in January did.

Within the pages of the indictment are allegations that Bankman-Fried launched or directed the launch of various companies that could secure bank accounts, as FTX could not on its own. The DOJ says Bankman-Fried oversaw the misuse of client funds and explicitly instructed her team to conceal the source of funds donated to political campaigns.

Under the superseding indictment, Bankman-Fried faces charges of:

The original indictment listed only charges for:

Beyond that, the new documents provide many small details that contain some pretty serious claims.

“In November 2022, the general counsel of FTX.US warned employees that they should preserve documents due to the involvement of regulators, then posted in a company’s Slack channel that FTX needed to be shut down,” part of the superseding indictment. so. “However, Bankman-Fried deleted the attorney general’s notice that FTX was being shut down, continued to use Signal Messages, and proceeded to delete some of his own statements on Twitter, including his tweets that client funds were ‘fine’.”

The FTX founder also reportedly led the creation of North Dimension, a US-based company, solely to act as an intermediary between FTX and US banks. Prosecutors allege that Bankman-Fried lied about North Dimensions’ true intent in getting through a bank’s due diligence process.

Moreover, prosecutors believe Bankman-Fried never separated FTX customer assets from Alameda assets or other assets, despite “representations … to the contrary.”

Bankman-Fried “used the FTX client funds he misappropriated and was instructed to, among other things, … finance substantially [his] illegal political influence campaign, which involved flooding the political system with tens of millions of dollars in illegal contributions to both Democrats and Republicans made in other people’s names to hide the true source of the money and evade federal election law,” said.

The document claimed that Bankman-Fried, while openly supporting Democrats, also bolstered Republicans by having an unidentified co-conspirator act as the public face of these donations.

While the document does not name the individual, CoinDesk reporting found that dozens of Republicans received donations from FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame. Salame has not been charged with any wrongdoing as of press time.

Another unidentified co-conspirator appears to be Nishad Singh, the former director of engineering. While the criminal indictment against Singh does not name Bankman-Fried, prosecutors filed the “conspiracy to make illegal political contributions” charge against him that they filed against the former CEO.

The indictment details how Singh allegedly donated to candidates and committees far beyond federal lines and lied about their origins.

“In or about 2022, Nishad Singh, Defendant and one or more other conspirators agreed to and made contributions to candidates and committees in the Southern District of New York that were paid to use funds from Alameda Research and reported to the Federal Election Commission in names of persons other than the true source of the funds, the filing states.

The SEC and CFTC filings against Singh are both more willing to name Bankman-Fried (as well as other former FTX executives).

The SEC filing spends a lot of time looking at the way FTX and Alameda were structured, noting Alameda’s ability to carry a negative balance on FTX’s books and the alleged misappropriation of customer funds for other uses. Likewise, the CFTC filing alleges federal violations based on how the companies were set up and what they actually did.

“A lot of people have seen Nigeria as an experiment,” said Varun Paul, CBDC and Market Infrastructure Director at Fireblocks. Paul was previously head of the Bank of England’s fintech hub.

Countries are likely to see if Nigeria cracks the code on CBDC adoption.

The Central Bank of Nigeria even limited the amount of cash people can withdraw from banks in January to encourage eNaira adoption, but despite efforts, people are not looking at eNaira as an option – even in the midst of a cash crunch.

People are currently complaining on Twitter that they don’t have access basic needs as fuel or food cashless (thanks in part to Nigeria’s $220 billion informal economy that relies on cash and a limited amount of notes in circulation).

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