The founder and former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, which is now a bankrupt crypto exchange platform, tried to distance himself from proposals of forgery in his first public appearance since his company’s failure dumbfounded investors and left creditors encountering losses totaling billions of dollars.
On Wednesday, At the New York Times Dealbook Summit with Andrew Ross Sorkin speaking via a video link Bankman-Fried said that he did not intentionally mix their customers’ funds that were on FTX with the funds at his proprietary trading firm Alameda Research.
“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” Bankman-Fried said in the hour-long interview, summing up that he personally doesn’t feel he has any criminal liability.
Bankman-Fried claimed that the full scale of Alameda’s position on FTX caught him by surprise.
According to the report, two people who were familiar with the matter said that the Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of FTX funds from customers to Alameda Research then after that the liquidity crunch happened at FTX. And also other people said that around $1 billion funds of customers had vanished.
In November, Bankman-Fried told Reuters that the company misread its “confusing internal labeling” and it did not “secretly transfer”.
On November 11, Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO, and the company filed for bankruptcy after the investors and traders pulled out their funds from the platform around $6 billion in just 3 days it also canceled the rescue deal that was made by rival Binance.
“That week, so much happened,” he said.
Bankman-Fried said he was talking from the Bahamas and that the interrogation was against the recommendation of his lawyers. He was seen in the video link speaking from a room, dressed in a black T-shirt, and sometimes drinking from a mug.
A source told Reuters that in mid-November the investigation was initiated into how the company handles the funds of the customers in the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have also extended investigations.