Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX in 2019 and is its CEO. Photo FTX
Sam Bankman-Fried, the indicted former owner of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has now had a 13th charge leveled against him by federal prosecutors who say that he bribed “one or more” Chinese government officials with $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in an attempt to get them to help Bankman-Fried access frozen bank accounts belonging to his hedge fund, Alameda Research.
The accounts were unfrozen after the alleged bribe was paid.
“Samuel Bankman-Fried aka ‘SBF’ authorized and directed a bribe of at least $40 million to one or more Chinese government officials,” reads the new indictment.
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“The purpose of the bribe was to influence and induce one or more Chinese government officials to unfreeze certain Alameda trading accounts containing over $1 billion in cryptocurrency, which had been frozen by Chinese authorities,” adds the indictment.
It is against U.S, law to bribe foreign officials in any nation, even if the action itself is not against the law in the country in question.
Sam Bankman-Fried was also hit with new bail restrictions by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan after the new indictment. Federal prosecutors asked for the changes to keep him from using messaging apps and a virtual private network in an attempt to conduct business in circumvention of the restrictions already imposed.
Now Bankman-Fried will be to just two electronic devices, a notebook computer and a telephone, both of which will be closely monitored.
Sam Bankman-Fried stands accused of eight counts of fraud and conspiracy. If convicted on all counts, he could be sentenced to as much as 115 years in jail. The charges came after his FTX cryptocurrency exchange company went bust a few weeks ago. The big question over the fall of FTX is “what happened to all of the money that people left with the company?” FTX was a crypto bank, so to speak, a place where people could park their virtual assets. But unlike with banks, there is no regulation over the handling of cryptos and FTX is said to have moved people’s cryptos around, basically that the company spent their money.
Based in the Bahamas, FTX was a cryptocurrency exchange that said it was built by traders, for traders. FTX offers industry-first derivatives, options, volatility products and leveraged tokens. FTX had more than one million traders using its services when it failed.
When FTX crashed, Sam Bankman-Fried himself lost 94% of his total wealth, or about $14.6 billion and was forced to sell whatever was left of FTX to chief rival Binance.
FTX, it seems, was nothing more than a house of cards built upon its own assets. The company’s net worth was based on ownership of its own tokens. This means that FTX claimed to be wealthy because it owned the same crypto tokens the company issued. And these tokens had no tangible net worth.
