The founder of the cryptocurrency giant that collapsed a month ago was arrested at the request of the United States. The administrator appointed at the head of the company denounces the lack of control that prevailed at FTX. He must testify on Tuesday before the Congress.
by Arnaud Leparmentier (New York, correspondent)
It was not until a month: Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, the founder of the FTX bankruptcy cryptocurrencies, was arrested on Monday December 12 in the Bahamas where he lived.
“Earlier in the evening, the Bahamas authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the United States government, on the basis of a sealed indictment filed by the South New York district. We plan to Raise the seals on the indictment in the morning and we will have more to say at that time “, announced, on Twitter, one of the federal prosecutors of New York, Damian Williams .
This arrest comes four weeks after the collapse of FTX. The cryptocurrency exchange platform, which was considered one of the safest on the planet, had gone bankrupt in a few days after one of its competitors, Binance, leader of the sector, had decided to withdraw its funds . It turned out that FTX lent the capital of its customers to Alameda, a company based in Bahamas and controlled by Sam Bankman-Fried, which had launched in the wildest speculative bets.
m. Bankman-Fried, taking advantage of the particularly flexible regulation of the Bahamas, had used personally: according to the Wall Street Journal, he had benefited from a personal loan of $ 1 billion (950 million euros) while one of Its lieutenants had borrowed from FTX $ 543 million.
The fine team of young fanatics of cryptocurrencies lived in a luxury colocation in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, of an estimated value of $ 30 million. Everything was mixed in this world: Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, son of Stanford teachers in California, had Caroline for girlfriend Ellison, 28, general manager of the Alameda hedge fund. No separation between activities was organized.
This mushroom empire, which was valued $ 32 billion a few months ago in its last round with investors, had no serious internal control. It collapsed with the fall of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which underwent the burst of the stock bubble at Wall Street.
The absence of regulations in this abstruse world, the inexistence of a board of directors worthy of the name, despite the prestigious names of finance which had financed FTX, only aggravated the disaster : billions of dollars have gone up in smoke.
The arrest comes on the eve of the testimony to the Congress of the United States of John Ray, provisional administrator of the FTX Empire and who presided over the final destinies of Enron, a company in energy trading in fraudulent bankruptcy in 2001.
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