The FTX saga is still ongoing six months after the crypto exchange crashed but there have been some interesting twists and turns in this story. One of these is founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s (popularly referred to as SBF) insistence on pleading non-guilty despite other important figures at the company such as Caroline Ellison pleading guilty. This time around, the founder insists on his innocence while asking the judge to scrap the case.
Sam Bankman-Fried Wants Lawsuit Thrown Out
A new filing in the lawsuit against the FTX founder has revealed how SBF is looking to play this one. Apparently, SBF has chosen to stick to his guns and continue to plead not guilty. The filing in the Manhattan Federal Court also shows that the disgraced founder wants the charges against him to be thrown out.
However, there are three charges that SBF’s lawyers did not request to be thrown out, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit commodities fraud.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and his lawyers have filed a motion to dismiss 10 of his 13 charges. These include:
conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit commodities fraud.
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According to his lawyers, some of the charges against the founder were added after his extradition from the Bahamas. They added that of the five new charges, four of them actually violated the “Treaty’s rule of specialty provision.” So in total, SBF’s team is urging the court to dismiss 10 out of the 13 total charges that have been levied against him
The House Of Cards That Is FTX
In November 2022, the FTX crypto exchange first started to publicly show signs of a crack in its structure when Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed his exchange would be selling its holdings of FTX’s native FTT Token. This triggered a bank run on the exchange and while it held up well for a couple of days, it came crashing down in less than a week with the exchange filing for bankruptcy in the end.
The aftermath was the introduction of a new CEO in the person of John Ray III who said FTX’s accounting was one of the worst he had ever seen. However, since then, Ray and his team have been able to recover around $7.3 billion in assets and cash and there has been talk of a possible reopening of the crypto exchange.
Associates of Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, pled guilty to the charges brought against them and have agreed to work with authorities to help recover what they can of user funds. This leaves SBF as the only one left fighting the charges. His case has been scheduled to go on trial in October 2023.
When it begins, SBF’s trial will no doubt be one of the most notorious trials for white-collar crime in recent history. For now, the 30-year-old founder is under house arrest after being released to his parents’ custody following a $250 million bail.