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DailyWire.com: Sam Bankman-Fried Charged For Allegedly Bribing Communist Chinese Officials

By Ryan Saavedra • Mar 28, 2023 DailyWire.com

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged by the Justice Department in a superseding indictment on Tuesday of allegedly paying millions of dollars of bribes to a member of the Chinese communist government.

Several companies controlled by Bankman-Fried filed for bankruptcy at the end of last year after customers and investors learned that FTX had improperly commingled funds with sister trading company Alameda Research.

Bankman-Fried “authorized and directed a bribe of at least $40 million to one or more Chinese government officials,” the new indictment said. “The purpose of the bribe was to influence and induce one or more Chinese government officials to unfreeze certain Alameda trading accounts containing over $1 billion in cryptocurrency, which had been frozen by Chinese authorities.”

Court documents said that Bankman-Fried and others sought to regain access to the assets to “fund additional Alameda trading activity, in order to assist BANKMAN-FRIED and Alameda in obtaining and retaining business.”

The new criminal charge comes in addition to 12 other criminal charges that the 31-year-old already faces in the case.

The DOJ initially charged Bankman-Fried with eight alleged crimes back in December, including two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, one count of conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, one count conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and commit campaign finance violations.

In February, the DOJ returned a superseding indictment charging Bankman-Fried with four additional crimes, including conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, securities fraud, and fraud in the connection of the purpose or sale of a derivative.

If convicted on all counts, Bankman-Fried faces more than 150 years behind bars.

Bankman-Fried donated $39 million primarily to Democratic nominees and political action committees ahead of the 2022 midterm elections after emerging as the second-largest donor for the Biden campaign in the 2020 cycle. He was granted four meetings at the White House with senior advisers in the months before his companies filed for bankruptcy.

Beyond using the customer funds to enrich himself, acquire luxury real estate in the Bahamas, and influence the political system, Bankman-Fried donated millions to various media outlets through a nonprofit organization called Building a Stronger Future, which he ran with the help of his brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, a former Democratic congressional staffer and the director of Guarding Against Pandemics. Several media outlets ran favorable coverage for Bankman-Fried in the days after his empire imploded. The New York Times, for instance, posited in one article that the alleged fraudster merely had “ambitions” that “exceeded his grasp.”

Ben Zeisloft contributed to this report.

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Originally posted by Sig2340:
[QUOTE] [url=https://www.dailywire.com/news/sam-bankman-fried-charged-for-allegedly-bribing-communist-chinese-officials]DailyWire.com: Bankman-Fried “authorized and directed a bribe of at least $40 million to one or more Chinese government officials,”

Bankman-Fried donated $39 million primarily to Democratic nominees and political action committees

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The new management team at FTX released an initial report on what led to the demise of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, painting a damning picture of its operations under ousted founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried's leadership.

The FTX debtors, led by new chief executive and restructuring officer John J. Ray III, wrote in the high-level overview that "while the FTX Group's failure is novel in the unprecedented scale of harm it caused in a nascent industry, many of its root causes are familiar: hubris, incompetence, and greed."

"Despite the public image it sought to create of a responsible business, the FTX Group was tightly controlled by a small group of individuals who showed little interest in instituting an appropriate oversight or control framework," the report reads.

"These individuals stifled dissent, commingled and misused corporate and customer funds, lied to third parties about their business, joked internally about their tendency to lose track of millions of dollars in assets, and thereby caused the FTX Group to collapse as swiftly as it had grown," it added.

The report says under the direction of former leadership, FTX and its affiliated entities lacked the appropriate management, governance and organizational structure necessary for its size, as well as the financial and accounting controls needed for a multibillionaire-dollar firm.

It went on to cite Bankman-Fried's own internal communications to reflect the poor recordkeeping at Alameda Research, the affiliated hedge fund he co-founded, wherein he appeared to acknowledge the organization's loose financials and dismiss the issue.

"Alameda is unauditable," Bankman-Fried wrote to colleagues. "I don't mean this in the sense of ‘a major accounting firm will have reservations about auditing it'; I mean this in the sense of ‘we are only able to ballpark what its balances are, let alone something like a comprehensive transaction history.’ We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life."

Several former FTX and Alameda executives are currently facing federal charges related to the companies' failures, which resulted in tens of billions of dollars of losses to customers.

Bankman-Fried's fellow FTX co-founders Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, as well as ex-Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison have all admitted to wrongdoing at the failed entities and pleaded guilty to multiple counts related to their alleged roles involving fraud at the firms. All three former executives are reportedly cooperating with prosecutors.

Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to all 13 federal counts against him and remains on house arrest at his parents' California home on a $250 million bond until his trial, which is slated for October.

The FTX debtors said further reports are forthcoming as they continue their probe.

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Originally posted by 2PAK:
John Ray, the new FTX CEO should file to stop the payments of those funds to his attorneys and also to claw back those funds (~$10M) back from SBF's father immediately. The IRS should also pursue a case for using stolen funds to transfer wealth to his parents and using the IRS gift exemption in the process.

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Originally posted by sdy:
https://www.breitbart.com/poli...t-sam-bankman-fried/


In the filing addressed to New York federal judge Lewis Kaplan, the Bahamas did not include the eighth charge from the original indictment, a campaign finance violation, in its extradition treaty.

“The Government has been informed that The Bahamas notified the United States earlier today that The Bahamas did not intend to extradite the defendant on the campaign contributions count,” the DOJ letter said. “Accordingly, in keeping with its treaty obligations to The Bahamas, the Government does not intend to proceed to trial on the campaign contributions count.

convenient for DEMs