FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (second left) is handcuffed by officers from the Royal Bahamas Police Force in Nassau, Bahamas, December 13, 2022.
Mario Duncanson | AFP | Getty’s paintings
FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried will now not challenge extradition to the US, which got here just days after he was held in a Bahamas prison awaiting trial, a person acquainted with the matter told CNBC.
The previous crypto billionaire will appear in a Bahamian court this Monday to formally waive his extradition rights, paving the way in which for federal authorities to secure his return to the US
Extradition between the Bahamas and the US is codified in a 1991 treaty. In practice, the trial takes months, if not years, as defendants have many avenues of appeal. Bankman-Fried’s legal team initially said it planned to fight extradition. A change of heart would greatly speed up the deadline for the Bankman-Fried federal trial.
The 30-year-old MIT graduate was originally scheduled to serve his next dissertation in February 2023.
A representative for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.
Bankman-Fried was indicted in a Latest York federal court on Monday on charges of electronic fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy to defraud the US and money laundering. If convicted, he could spend the remaining of his life in prison. The previous CEO of FTX can also be facing parallel charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over similar allegations that he has been working to defraud FTX customers out of billions of dollars since 2019, the yr the exchange was founded.
At the center of Bankman-Fried’s empire was Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund that federal regulators said used FTX client money to engage in trading that lost billions of dollars.
FTX’s demise was accelerated when reporting by CoinDesk revealed a highly concentrated position within the FTT coins it issues, which the Bankman-Fried Alameda Research hedge fund has used as collateral for billions in crypto loans. Binance, a rival exchange, has announced that it will sell its FTT holdings, triggering a massive withdrawal of funds. The corporate froze its assets and filed for bankruptcy a few days later. The SEC and CFTC charges indicated that FTX was mixing customer funds with Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency hedge fund Alameda Research, and that billions of customer deposits were lost along the way in which.
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