US prosecutors in the case against Sam Bankman-Fried asked a New York judge to set aside five criminal counts the FTX co-founder is contesting to avoid delaying a trial set for October on other charges related to the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange.
In a Wednesday night letter to US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams said a Bahamian court ruling Bankman-Fried won earlier in the week on those five counts would likely delay the trial. Asking the judge to push those charges to next year, potentially for a separate trial, Williams said the government was still willing to go to trial on the remaining eight counts. Those offenses are the most serious Bankman-Fried faces.
The 31-year-old has argued that charges added to his original indictment are invalid because they’re not covered by the extradition agreement under which he returned from the Bahamas to face US prosecution in December. He has asked the court to dismiss those counts in the US, or at least separate them from the earlier charges. In Wednesday night’s letter, Williams argued against dismissal, given the government’s request to split the case.
During a hearing on Thursday, Assistant US Attorney Nathan Rehn said after talking with Bahamian authorities, prosecutors were “under the view” the government there would consent to the new charges well before trial.
But that hasn’t happened. Regardless, Rehn argued, Bankman-Fried didn’t have legal standing to challenge the validity of the charges anyway. His legal team was asking the court to “insert itself in a series of Bahamian legal questions and diplomatic negotiations between two sovereign nations,” the prosecutor said.
Read More: Bankman-Fried to Get Bahamian Court Review of Latest US Charges
Bankman-Fried also filed a case in the Bahamas last week, and a judge there ruled Tuesday that he was entitled to court review in that country. The Bahamian judge also blocked the islands’ government from giving a necessary consent to the additional US charges before Thursday’s hearing.
Williams said in his letter that “it now appears that litigation of that motion will take some time and may not be resolved until near or even after the trial date.”
The eight counts on which prosecutors want to proceed are the most serious against Bankman-Fried, who operated his crypto empire from the Bahamas. The December indictment accused him of orchestrating a yearslong fraud scheme at FTX that cost customers and investors billions of dollars.
In February, as Bankman-Fried was living at his parents’ California house after being released on a $250 million bail package, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment charging him with four more offenses. A month later, it added another charge to the list, accusing Bankman-Fried of bribing Chinese officials to free $40 million frozen on a crypto exchange.
Judge Kaplan is yet to rule on whether the charges can be separated or not.
The case is US v. Bankman-Fried, 22-cr-673, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
(Updates with details from Thursday court hearing.)
Author: Ava Benny-Morrison