Sam Bankman-Fried Headed To US After Extradition From Bahamas – Sam Bankman-Fried, the detained founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was extradited to the United States, where he will face criminal charges, according to Bahamian authorities. Wednesday morning, reporters on the scene observed Bankman-Fried leave a Nassau courthouse in a dark SUV. Later, the vehicle was spotted arriving at a private airfield near the airport in Nassau, from which he is expected to be flown to the United States. He is expected to arrive in New York on Thursday, where he will likely appear before a US judge.
The disgraced crypto leader went to court in Nassau to inform a magistrate judge of his decision after several days of contradictory signals from Bankman-Fried’s US and Bahamian legal teams. At the hearing, Bankman-Fried agreed to be extradited to the United States. Reuters reported that his lawyer read an affidavit in which Bankman-Fried said that he has decided to agree to extradition in part out of a “desire to make the relevant customers whole.”
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“The Bahamas has determined that the provisional arrest and subsequent written consent by (Bankman-Fried) to be extradited without formal extradition proceedings satisfies the requirements of the (extradition treaty between the US and the Bahamas) and our nation’s Extradition Act,” said Bahamian attorney general Ryan Pinder, in a statement. After the hearing, Bankman-Fried was set to be transferred to US custody and returned to the US to be arraigned in criminal fraud charges connected to FTX’s dramatic collapse.
The US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York indicted Bankman-Fried, 30, on eight criminal charges, including fraud, conspiracy, and money-laundering offenses, as well as illegal political contributions. The 30-year-old man may spend the rest of his life in jail. In a series of often rambling media appearances, Bankman-Fried stated that he did not intend to commit fraud and was unaware of what was occurring at Alameda Research, the hedge fund he formed and which reportedly received billions of dollars in customer funds from FTX.
Last week, federal prosecutors clearly suggested that certain FTX-Alameda team members in the Bahamas had become government witnesses. “This was not a case of mismanagement or poor oversight, but of intentional fraud, plain and simple,” US attorney Damian Williams said last week. Williams said Bankman-Fried’s wrongdoing included “fraud on customers, investors, lenders and our campaign finance system.” Bankman-Fried’s return to the US resolves what has appeared to be a conflict between his US and Bahamian legal teams.
Jerone Roberts, Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas lawyer, told the judge on Monday, during a chaotic hearing in Nassau, that he did not know the purpose of the proceedings. Bankman-Fried allegedly agreed to extradition after consulting with both sets of lawyers. “He’s waiving extradition to curry favor with the government, whether it’s via a deal in order to save the government from spending potentially years trying to extradite him, or he’s trying to cooperate,” said Jeffrey Lichtman, a defense attorney who has been involved in a number of high-profile criminal defense cases.
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“If he’s waiving extradition,” Lichtman added, “he’s not going to trial. That’s not exactly a surprise in a case like this because he may not have a defense. In a case where the fraud is plain and easy to prove, it may not go to trial so he’s very possibly looking to get the best deal he can.” In Lichtman’s view, Bankman-Fried is likely to try to cooperate but the government may not want him, given that as founder and chief executive officer of FTX, he is at the top of the fraud scheme it has alleged.
