This past Wednesday evening, agents from U.S. law enforcement have officially taken FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried into custody so that he can face the currently pending criminal charges stemming from the wholesale collapse of his firm.
A report coming from The Wall Street Journal explained that Bankman-Fried was being transported to New York in order to stand trial for the charges against him within the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York.
FTX officially filed for bankruptcy late last month in the wake of users finding out that the company had been inexplicably intertwined with Alameda Research, its sister company. Both of these companies had been under control of Bankman-Fried and a group of amateur executives all living and working out of penthouse suites in the Bahamas. The allegedly criminal entrepreneur was taken into custody by the police forces of the island nation where his company is based earlier this week as officials of federal law enforcement and U.S. securities regulators openly accused him of fraud.
The legal team for Bankman-Fried have attempted to negotiate an agreement in regard to bail which would allow the 30-year-old to be let out of prison prior to the trial, but were wholly unsuccessful in their attempts to get him a bail price while he was still in custody in a jail in the Bahamas.
Bankman-Fried was slammed with charges from a Manhattan federal grand jury of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission and commit campaign finance violations, explained the Department of Justice in a released statement.
If convicted on all standing charges, Bankman-Fried could be looking at a sentence to the tune of 115 years in prison.
The prosecution team currently alleges that Bankman-Fried blatently misappropriated billions of dollars of customer funds deposited into the cryptocurrency exchange that he founded before openly lying to the FTX lenders and investors about the company itself and about Alameda Research, his cryptocurrency hedge fund.
Bankman-Fried and his team were brazenly deceiving and conning customers of FTX from the very start of the company, expressed prosecutors. He allegedly utilized multiple billions of dollars in funds from customers for his own personal reasons, to pay off loans taken out by Alameda Research, and to hand out multiple millions of dollars in donations to various political campaigns. Bankman-Fried was the second largest donor for the Democrat party over the course of the last political cycle, handing out funds to the tune of tens of millions of dollars to various left-wing groups and Democrat candidates.
