Sam Bankman-Fried fails to dismiss criminal charges related to FTX

Sam Bankman-Fried must face the full suite of criminal charges brought against him over the multibillion-dollar collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange, a New York court has ruled.

In an order on Tuesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan denied motions seeking to dismiss 10 of the 13 counts faced by the former entrepreneur, including allegations of campaign finance violations and conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

Kaplan also dismissed arguments that certain charges brought after the 31-year-old was extradited from the Bahamas in December should be thrown out. A representative for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.

The US government’s case against Bankman-Fried had expanded significantly since he was first charged with eight counts — including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering — in December.

Four other criminal charges were added by prosecutors in February, including securities and commodities fraud, while a count alleging Bankman-Fried conspired to bribe Chinese officials was added in late March.

Bankman-Fried’s attorneys had deployed a series of arguments in seeking to dismiss 10 of those charges, including a claim that he should only face trial on the counts under which he explicitly agreed to be extradited.

In a surprise move earlier this month, the US government said it would agree to sever some of the post-extradition counts for a later trial, “in light of the uncertainty” over whether the Bahamian government consented to those extra charges.

Kaplan consented to that request. While he denied Bankman-Fried’s attempts to get the post-extradition counts dismissed on Tuesday, he said the defence could renew its argument “should the Bahamas object to any of the charges brought against [the defendant]”.

The order comes a day after a report by John Ray, the former Enron administrator who replaced Bankman-Fried as FTX’s chief executive after it filed for bankruptcy, which shone an unflattering light on the crypto company’s inner workings in the lead-up to its spectacular collapse in November.

FTX executives “lied to banks and auditors, executed false documents, and moved the FTX Group from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, taking flight from the United States to Hong Kong to the Bahamas, in a continual effort to enable and avoid detection of their wrongdoing”, Ray wrote.

He added that an attorney for FTX created a “sham intercompany agreement” that was backdated by two years in order to deceive external auditors about its finances, and the resulting audit was used to raise money from investors.

Bankman-Fried’s trial over the pre-extradition charges is due to begin in October. He had pleaded not guilty to all the charges.