FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried used to be worth $26.5 billion according to Forbes at just 30 years of age, until he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on November 11, 2022, where he is estimated to have lost at least $16 billion. Following an article from November issued by CoinDesk, a news publication following cryptocurrency trading, issued a report on FTX.
Attorney Damian Williams broke the news on Monday that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas. Following Bankman-Fried’s arrest by the Royal Bahamas Police Force after a request from the United States which filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, the Bahamas expect the United States to quickly move to extradite the crypto billionaire. Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement that they are also looking into Bankman-Fried and FTX’s collapse in an investigation separate from the U.S.’s criminal charges.
As previously reported, Bankman-Fried is being charged with multiple different crimes in the United States, along with violating campaign finance laws, as he was one of the Democrat’s largest donors in their 2020 and 2022 elections. He donated $10 million in 2020 helping to get Joe Biden elected, and then became Democrats’ second largest doner when he donated $39 million during the 2022 Midterm election cycle towards Democratic candidates and organizations, according to data from Open Secrets, which listed him as the nation’s sixth-largest individual midterm donor, as well as Bidens second-largest donor.
However, Bankman-Fried has a new claim about his political donations:
“All my Republican donations were dark,”
“[R]eporters freak the f**k out if you donate to a Republican because they’re all super liberal. And I didn’t want to have that fight, so I just made all the Republican ones dark.”
Bankman-Fried would go on to estimate that he may be around the “second or third biggest” Republican doner.
According to Axios:
The federal indictment unsealed on Tuesday includes eight charges — including one that Bankman-Fried conspired to violate a federal law barring campaign contributions knowingly made in the name of another person. That’s what’s known as a straw donation, and it’s often used to illegally mask the true identity of a political donor by routing his or her contribution through another person or organization. It can also be used by a single donor to circumvent campaign contribution limits by parceling out a large donation among multiple straw donors, or by companies trying to get around corporate donation restrictions by routing money through an individual donor.
So, it’s unclear if Bankman-Fried was attempting to illegally hide his political donators, or if Bankman-Fried was attempting to simply hide his donations from criticism from the media.
