It should be noted that a Bahamas judge tonight ordered Bankman-Fried to be sent to the country’s Department of Corrections, and until February 8, 2023. Accordingly, Sam will not be released on bail, although the businessman’s lawyers insisted on it.

Here are fresh pictures of Bunkman-Fried being escorted out of the courthouse tonight.

Sam Bunkman-Fried being escorted out of court tonight

The pictures were published by Reuters.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried on his way out of court tonight

What did Bachman-Fried want to talk about?

According to Cointelegraph sources, the former FTX CEO planned to blame everyone but himself for what happened. One of the points of the report was to report that the US arm of the FTX.US exchange remained completely financially stable. As a reminder, FTX.US is also undergoing a court case for the bankruptcy of the exchange, so users cannot get their money from there now.

The US branch of FTX didn’t get into the bankruptcy proceedings by accident – it was the initiative of the exchange’s new CEO, lawyer John Ray III. At least, that’s how Sam wanted to pitch it to congressmen in his failed speech. Here is the relevant quote.

US clients were protected, at least until Mr Ray’s team took over.

Ex-CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried

Incidentally, Ray himself attended a meeting of the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives yesterday. In his preparatory papers, the lawyer in charge of restructuring the bankrupt company’s finances also said he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate control”. Here is his rejoinder.

Although our investigation is ongoing, and detailed conclusions are due when it is completed, the collapse of FTX Group appears to be due to the absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of extremely inexperienced and incompetent people who failed to implement virtually any of the systems or controls necessary for a company entrusted with someone else’s money or assets.

All in all, this is nothing new: after all, Ray has said before that FTX management ran the business with appalling negligence. Even the behaviour of certain executives, such as former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Allison, was not unheard of. In one of her interviews she openly admitted that she often failed to use basic risk-management techniques when managing large deals, i.e. she didn’t set stop-losses.

As a reminder, a stop loss allows you to get rid of an asset if its value falls to a certain level. In this case, the trader protects himself from further losses and controls the risks.

Ex-CEO of Alameda Research Caroline Allison

John Ray III was also about to confirm to Congress the suspicions of most investors – Sam and his team did have mechanisms to access the assets of exchange clients. They used their power, misused capital, and inflated a financial bubble within Alameda Research itself.

In addition, the US division of FTX.US, which was also run by Bankman-Fried, did not operate independently of the Bahamian company, i.e. FTX itself. Here is the relevant replica that Decrypt cites.

Chapter 11 protection in bankruptcy proceedings was necessary both to avoid capital flight from FTX US and to give our team time to identify and protect assets.

So this is proof of Sam’s lies – just above we wrote that he wanted to assure congressmen of FTX.US’s independence. Ray himself believes that including FTX.US in the bankruptcy proceedings was the right move. But back to the aforementioned copy of Bankman-Fried’s deposition. In it, he wanted to place some of the blame on representatives of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

This firm handled the bankruptcy paperwork, which also included FTX.US. Although Sam signed the papers himself, he wanted to claim that pressure was being exerted on him.

I have 19 pages of screenshots of correspondence with Sullivan & Cromwell, Mr Miller and others. This is, I believe, evidence of pressure on me to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy as soon as possible.

Screenshot of correspondence with Ryan Miller from Sam’s report

The aforementioned Mr Miller is the general counsel of FTX.US, Ryan Miller. He was, according to Sam, in a group of interested parties who were trying to make the bankruptcy of the exchange and its affiliates official as soon as possible. However, it doesn’t matter so much anymore, because Bancman-Fried couldn’t avoid being arrested. In other words, he could end up behind bars much sooner than many had assumed.


It should be noted that Sam Bancman-Fried is facing a total of eight charges. As the indictment notes, all of which could lead to 165 years in prison.


FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried

We believe that Sam is unlikely to get out of the current situation any longer. After all, the charges against him are serious and amount to more than a hundred years in prison. In addition, the authorities clearly do not believe the version that Bachmann-Fried was not aware of all the details of what was going on with the same Alameda Reseach. So now we need to keep an eye on the investigation, which will continue in several countries.