FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried won’t be appearing in the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters of California on Tuesday after all.
The cryptocurrency kingpin has been arrested by Bahamian authorities, at the request of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and will have his first court appearance in Nassau on Tuesday on multiple felony charges.
An extradition and trial in a New York federal court is expected to hold the cryptocurrency scammer accountable for crimes of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering, according to the New York Times, which has sources close to the matter and which broke the story Monday.
Meanwhile, the indictment against Bankman-Fried, who lost billions of investors’ dollars and gave tens of millions of dollars to Democrat candidates, including Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola, political action groups, and news organizations, will be unsealed on Tuesday, said Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Bankman-Fried filed for bankruptcy on behalf of FTX on Nov. 11 as his crypto-kingdom unraveled, and its since become clear that he was running the organization with no accepted financial controls, and was moving funds back and forth between the web of companies he controlled.
Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission also is preparing charges against Bankman-Fried, for “violations of our securities laws, which will be filed publicly tomorrow [Tuesday] in the Southern District of New York,” according to enforcement director Gurbir Grewal.
Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
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,” he said in his statement.
“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere,” Davis said.
