Agencies
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with directing $40 million in bribes to one or more Chinese officials to unfreeze assets relating to his cryptocurrency business in a newly rewritten indictment unsealed Tuesday.
The charge of conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act raises to 13 the number of charges Bankman-Fried faces after he was arrested in the Bahamas in December and brought to the United States soon afterward. The indictment was returned on Monday.
FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, when it ran out of money after the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run. He has remained free on a $250 million personal recognizance bond that lets him stay with his parents in Palo Alto, California.
He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he cheated investors out of billions of dollars before his business collapsed.
An arraignment on the rewritten indictment was set for Thursday by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. He also on Tuesday banned Bankman-Fried from communicating with current or former employees of FTX, the global cryptocurrency exchange he founded or Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund trading firm linked to FTX.
The order also limits Bankman-Fried to one laptop and phone and bans him from other cellphones, computers, or “smart” devices with internet access.
The alleged bribes stemmed from the operation of Alameda Research.
The indictment said Chinese law enforcement authorities in early 2021 froze certain Alameda cryptocurrency trading accounts on two of China’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The accounts, it said, contained about $1 billion in cryptocurrency.
