Bahamas attorney general complains of reputational damage over FTX bankruptcy
The Bahamas is a place where laws are strictly enforced, a statement made by Ryan Pinder, the country’s Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, during his recent press conference. Pinder’s speech lasted about 20 minutes. During his speech, he mentioned the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX more than forty times, although the name of its founder Sam Bankman-Friede was mentioned only once. Overall, the collapse of the platform was the focus of a press conference where an official tried to justify the reputation of the Bahamas. After all, this is where FTX is headquartered and several properties acquired for Bachman-Fried and his inner circle.
What are the consequences of the collapse of the FTX exchange
Pinder has hinted that the Bahamas government is not happy about the damage to its reputation due to the collapse of FTX. Here’s his relevant rejoinder, cited by Decrypt.
We were shocked at the ignorance of those who claim FTX came to the Bahamas because they don’t want to submit to the control of regulators. In fact, there are plenty of countries in the world that do not have legislative or regulatory bodies over the cryptocurrency and digital asset market, but the Bahamas is not one of them.
Ryan Pinder, Attorney General of The Bahamas
Another interesting detail voiced by the official: the trading company Alameda Research, which is closely associated with FTX, is not based in The Bahamas. However, the government promises to take action if it turns out in the future that Alameda did have important connections here. However, this seems more like a cop-out, since Alameda was founded by Bancman-Friede, and at least part of the business processes definitely took place in the Bahamas.
Pinder also noted that the FTX debacle was just one episode in a string of business failures in recent months. He continues.
The recent events surrounding the insolvency crisis faced by the FTX group are happening all over the world in virtually every sector. What has happened is easier to understand as an isolated case of one major business collapse resulting from questionable internal governance and corporate management practices.
It is likely to refer to a string of other cryptocurrency bankruptcies that have been going on since the spring. Earlier it was reported that financial problems at other sites were a major factor in FTX’s collapse, while its affiliate Alameda only managed to postpone the inevitable by a few months.
A brief history of the collapse of FTX
Pinder's words take on a particularly interesting context after examining his biography in more detail. He was born in the Bahamas but attended high school in New York before graduating from the University of Miami with a law degree. Following a return to his home country and working in parliament for several years, he left public service in 2014 to take what he said was a "mind-blowing" deal to become chief legal officer at Deltec Bank & Trust, a Bahamian bank.
Deltec Bank has ties to FTX – its clients include stabelcoin issuer Tether, and its chairman Jean Chalopin is also the head of FTX-owned Farmington State Bank in Washington state. Incidentally, the very acquisition of the bank by the exchange must have been done for the purpose of obtaining a banking licence in the US.
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While Bahamian government officials are looking for excuses, popular bloggers have gone to the country in search of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Friede. One of them is blogger Ben Armstrong, also known as Bitboy Crypto. Over the weekend he launched a live stream on a walk around the Albany resort, a gated community located on New Providence Island. It was there that the FTX headquarters had been housed in the residence since last September.
It should be noted that Bitboy's reputation is far from good. Advertisements for many new cryptocurrency projects on his blog have ended in serious losses for first-time investors. Read more about that here.
Armstrong also visited the site of a property allegedly owned by Bankman-Fried’s parents. He posted the video on his YouTube channel.
Bitboy is not the only one who tried to break into the FTX residences. Another “crypto-spy” was Gabriel Haynes. In an interview with Decrypt, he said he was doing it for the community of defrauded exchange investors. Here’s the line.
I want to make good fun content that people will enjoy. People lost a lot of money on this and I got so many messages that they felt so much better after watching my videos about Sam and the whole story.
Funds for Haynes’ trip were raised through the Juicebox website, a protocol that allows people to donate Etherium to certain crowdfunding projects. More than 70 payments have been made for the initiative, and the campaign is currently one of the most popular on the platform.
Trending campaigns on Juicebox
Generally speaking, Bankman-Fried is not the only former guru of the crypto world who is now being “hunted” by individual investor groups. Previously, a similar manhunt has been launched against Terra ecosystem creator Do Kwon, whose project collapse this spring led to multi-billion dollar losses for investors. It’s unclear whether anyone will succeed in finding Sam, but this could be sensational content.
We think this kind of activity by cryptobloggers could end up being a problem for them, as such actions could clearly be interpreted as harassment of a certain individual. However, this would hardly happen if the same Attorney General of the Bahamas had taken more action against Bankman-Friede. And while the latter is at large, members of the blockchain community are clearly not going to rest easy.
Stay tuned for more interesting news in our Millionaire Crypto Chat. There we talk about other interesting topics related to the blockchain and decentralisation industry.
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