A person who knows about the situation said on Saturday that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried will go to court in the Bahamas on Monday to change his mind about fighting extradition to the US, where he is charged with fraud.
On Tuesday, a federal court in Manhattan charged the 30-year-old cryptocurrency mogul with trying to scam FTX customers by using billions of dollars in stolen deposits to pay for expenses and debts and make investments for his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research LLC.
If he agrees to be extradited, he will be able to face charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance in a U.S. court.
Related: What happens if Sam Bankman-Fried misses the deadline to answer the request for testimony?
Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, a defence lawyer, said that Bankman-Fried would probably be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn when she got to the United States. However, some federal defendants are being held at jails just outside of New York City because the facility is too full.
Margulis-Ohnuma said that at Bankman-First Fried’s court hearing in Manhattan, he would be asked to enter a plea and a judge would decide on bail. The lawyer also said that a hearing like this must happen within 48 hours of Bankman’s arrival in the U.S., but it’s likely to happen sooner.
Prosecutors are likely to say that Bankman-Fried is a flight risk and should stay in jail because the case involves a lot of money and it’s not clear where the money is.
“The money that went missing gives prosecutors strong reasons to believe that he is a flight risk,” said Michael Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor and white-collar defence lawyer. “I expect that if a judge gives someone pretrial release, they will have to follow a lot of strict rules.”
Experts in the law told Reuters that any trial is likely more than a year away.
A Bankman-Fried representative didn’t want to say anything. Bankman-Fried has said that FTX had problems with risk management, but he does not think he is guilty of a crime.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan did not want to say anything.
“The biggest financial scams in US history”
It wasn’t clear right away why Bankman-Fried changed his mind and decided not to fight being taken away.
He was sent back to the Bahamas’ Fox Hill prison on Tuesday after Chief Magistrate JoyAnn Ferguson-Pratt denied his request to stay at home until his extradition hearing.
In a report from 2021, the U.S. State Department said that conditions at Fox Hill were “harsh.” They pointed to overcrowding, rodent infestations, and the fact that prisoners used buckets as toilets. Authorities there say that things have gotten better since then.
Bankman-Fried made a fortune worth more than $20 billion by building FTX into one of the biggest exchanges in the world during the cryptocurrency boom. Last Monday, he was arrested in the Bahamas, where he lives and where FTX is based. This happened just a month after the exchange went down because so many customers pulled their money out at once.
Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said that the collapse of FTX was “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” He has said that the investigation is still going on and asked anyone with information about wrongdoing at FTX or Alameda to help.
Ryan Salame, a top executive at FTX, told securities regulators in the Bahamas on November 9 that assets belonging to the exchange’s customers were moved to Alameda to cover the hedge fund’s losses, according to a document made public as part of FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware.
Related: In a live interview, Sam Bankman-Fried was asked about the fall of FTX.
On November 11, FTX filed for bankruptcy. On the same day, Bankman-Fried quit as CEO.
A request for a comment from Salame’s lawyer was not met right away.
