Bankman-Fried is accused of authorising the payment of $40 million to get Chinese officials to unfreeze accounts at Alameda Research, a Hong Kong-based trading firm affiliated with FTX, holding more than $1 billion.
According to prosecutors, the Alameda accounts were frozen in 2021 as part of a Chinese government investigation into two cryptocurrency exchanges in that country.A spokesman for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.With the charge of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Bankman-Fried now faces 13 criminal counts.
Three of his close associates, Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, have already pleaded guilty to fraud and are cooperating with the government.He was arrested in the Bahamas, where his cryptocurrency empire FTX was based, in December and extradited back to the United States. Prosecutors claimed Bankman-Fried conspired to influence US crypto regulation through donations by him and others at FTX.
Along with Binance, OKX and Huobi were among the largest crypto exchanges in the world by trading volume before the Chinese government cracked down on crypto trading in 2017.Bankman-Fried and “others operating at his direction” tried to unfreeze the Alameda accounts in 2021, including by recruiting attorneys to lobby in China for the assets to be released and trying to transfer the crypto to fraudulent accounts set up on a Chinese exchange.
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