ReportWire

Tag: sambankmanfried

  • Caroline Ellison, associate of Sam Bankman-Fried, says she’s ‘truly sorry’ for stealing billions of FTX customer money

    Caroline Ellison, associate of Sam Bankman-Fried, says she’s ‘truly sorry’ for stealing billions of FTX customer money

    [ad_1]

    Caroline Ellison has apologized for stealing billions in customer deposits at crypto exchange platform FTX to make bets at Alameda Research, the hedge fund she ran.

    “‘I am truly sorry for what I did.’”


    — Caroline Ellison, former head of Alameda Research

    Ellison made her comments in front of a judge in New York federal court, as she pleaded guilty to helping Sam Bankman-Fried make away with billions in customer funds while misleading investors and lenders and playing down the risk of their crypto trading platform.

    “‘I knew that it was wrong.’”


    — Ellison

    Along with Ellison, Zixiao “Gary” Wang, a former FTX chief technology office and co-founder, 29, pleaded guilty Monday this week during separate hearings.

    Federal authorities and regulators are making the case that Wang wrote software code, at Bankman-Fried’s behest, to create backdoors into FTX’s systems that allowed Ellison’s Alameda access to customer money and prop up FTX’s own token, FTT.

    The pair each potentially face decades in prison sentences if convicted after pleading guilty to charges that included wire fraud, securities and commodities fraud in exchange for leniency.

    Both have agreed to cooperate with authorities to lay the groundwork for Bankman-Fried’s own case as the alleged brains behind of one of the biggest crypto frauds in recent memory.

    On Thursday, Bankman-Fried was released from custody on a $250 million bond, following his first appearance in a U.S., court on fraud charges.

    FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11 when Bankman-Fried was ousted from the company he co-founded in 2019.

    The collapse of FTX was, perhaps, hastened by its competitor, Binance, who announced it was unloading $500 million in FTT tokens in November due to “recent revelations that have come to light” about the company’s books. That triggered mass redemptions by depositors, which FTX couldn’t meet.

    Ellison is a Stanford University graduate who grew up in the suburbs of Boston, the daughter of two MIT economists, according to the Wall Street Journal. After graduation, she worked at quantitative trading firm Jane Street, where she met fellow trader Bankman-Fried. She was rumored to be in a relationship with Bankman-Fried, who is an MIT grad, according to reports.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Bill Ackman says he sees why FTX victims want Sam Bankman-Fried to ‘suffer’ severe consequences ‘including jail time’

    Bill Ackman says he sees why FTX victims want Sam Bankman-Fried to ‘suffer’ severe consequences ‘including jail time’

    [ad_1]

    Hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman appears to be walking back comments he made via Twitter last week about Sam Bankman-Fried that some interpreted as implicit support for the 30-something who presided over one of the most epic bankruptcies in financial markets in recent memory.

    Last week, Ackman tweeted that Bankman-Fried’s statements made during a widely watched interview, streamed to New York from the crypto founder’s location in the Bahamas, was “believable.”

    “Many have interpreted my tweet to mean that I am defending SBF or somehow supporting him. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Ackman wrote Saturday, referring to Bankman-Fried by his initials SBF.

    Ackman went on to describe the implosion of Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX, and some of its associated businesses, as “at a minimum, the most egregious, large-scale case of business gross negligence that I have observed in my career.”

    Check out: The Sam Bankman-Fried roadshow rolls on: 10 crazy things the FTX founder has just said

    Ackman, who is the chief executive of Pershing Square Capital, a prominent investor in traditional markets, and an advocate of crypto, last week, tweeted this message following the widely watched interview of Bankman-Fried at the New York Times Dealbook Summit:

    “Call me crazy, but I think SBF is telling the truth.”

    Ackman has been chastised by some for seemingly offering verbal succor to a person who some have accused of, at the least, an epic mismanagement of client assets.

    Speaking against the wishes of his lawyers, Bankman-Fried on Wednesday, during the Dealbook interview, admitted to making mistakes but said that he never intended to mingle client funds with those of the firm to make leveraged bets on crypto via hedge fund Alameda Research, which he founded before he started FTX.

    “I didn’t know exactly what was going on,” Bankman said at the time.

    At least one response to Ackman’s Saturday tweet, questioned whether the hedge funder might be responding to blowback from his own clients.

    It isn’t the first time that Ackman has cast Bankman-Fried’s actions in a positive light. As the implosion of FTX was unfolding, Ackman said, in a now-deleted tweet, that he’d never before seen a CEO take responsibility as the crypto exchange operator did and that he wanted to give him “credit” for his actions. “It reflects well on him and the possibility of a more favorable outcome” for FTX, he wrote.

    On Saturday, one Twitter user asked Ackman if had any ties to Bankman-Fried, which the investor bluntly said he doesn’t.

    Bankman-Fried had been viewed as a financial darling inside and outside the crypto industry until his empire collapsed on Nov. 11 and it was revealed that affiliated hedge fund Alameda lost billions in FTX client money in leveraged crypto bets.

    John Ray, the new chief executive of FTX, in a filing to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, described the state of the crypto platform “as a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.” 

    [ad_2]

    Source link