Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the defunct cryptocurrency company FTX, has been arrested in the Bahamas, according to a report published by Reuters.
The news was first revealed by General Ryan Pinder, the country’s attorney general, who has also said that they had received a notification about the criminal charges against Bankman-Fried from the United States.
Elon Musk has alleged that Bankman-Fried had made donations of around $1 billion to candidates of the Democratic Party. Among individual donors to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, he was the second-largest.
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A tweet from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York confirmed that prosecutors in the US indicted Bankman-Fried, however, the indictment remains under the seal.
Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement both countries have “a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.” Bahamas would continue pursuing its own investigation into FTX’s collapse, along with the US’s criminal charges.
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According to a Bloomberg report on December 10, prosecutors from New York, FBI agents, and other regulators met with FTX’s lawyers to discuss documentation investigators want to obtain. The Justice Department was closely watching whether FTX improperly transferred hundreds of millions around the same time as the company declared bankruptcy.
Bankman-Fried was ready to testify virtually before the House Financial Services Committee about the exchange’s collapse on Tuesday.
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FTX plunged last month after a CoinDesk report disclosed that Alameda Research, a sister company also founded by Bankman-Fried, held a large number of FTT tokens, which are issued by FTX.
FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11 this year. In court filings and prepared Congressional testimony, CEO John J Ray III said he had never seen anything quite like the corporate governance and documentation failures that he found at FTX. The company had heavily merged customer and corporate assets, losing billions along the way. In his prepared statement, released Monday, he said his new team had managed to recover around $1 billion of company assets.