Just hours before he was set to testify before the House Financial Services Committee, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was arrested in the Bahamas on U.S. charges presumably connected with the utter failure of his crypto currency exchange FTX, in which investors lost billions of dollars.
The charges are expected to be revealed on Tuesday.
The arrest was made based on a sealed indictment filed by the United States Attorney’s Office Southern District of New York, the U.S. attorney said. “We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a statement.
The United States is likely to request Mr. Bankman-Fried’s extradition, according to a release issued by the Bahamas attorney general. He will be held in custody by Bahamian police pursuant to the country’s extradition law, the release says.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Bahamian officials were willing to help the U.S. in getting SBF back to the U.S.
“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,” Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement.
After giving $40 million to Democrat politicians in the 2022 election cycle, SBF went bust.
That’s an interesting business plan.
CAUGHT: Maxine Waters appears to blow a kiss at FTX’s chief fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried at a Congressional hearing while the cameras were still rolling
She’s the one who’s supposed to grill SBF next month?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 18, 2022
SBF was scheduled to appear remotely before Maxine Waters’s committee before she turned in her gavel. Democrats lost the House and their committee gavels in the November elections.
However, SBF said he said he was “quite overbooked” and couldn’t fire up the pj in time to testify.
During Monday’s interview with the “Unusual Whales” platform that was conducted on Twitter Spaces, Bankman-Fried confirmed he will testify — but through a Zoom link from his luxury residence in the Bahamas.
Bankman-Fried has been on a whirlwind media tour to defend his actions after FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11. But when asked why he would not fly in for the House hearing, the crypto huckster said: “I’m quite overbooked.”
Waters vacillated over having the worse-than-Bernie Madoff level “businessman” testify at her committee. He refused a subpoena to testify before the Senate.
SBF has been on a media shame-spiral tour to explain his business failures, which have taken on the look of a Ponzi scheme.
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