New Details Shed Light on FTX’s Campaign Contributions

Bankruptcy lawyers for FTX have said that about $90 million in customer money was used to make campaign contributions, and that the lawyers have sent letters to all the recipients of that campaign cash asking for it to be returned.

The revised indictment said that one of the former FTX executives, identified as co-conspirator 1, was uncomfortable with making a $1 million donation in his name to a so-called super political action committee that was affiliated with pro-LGBTQ causes. Yet the former executive was urged to donate by an unnamed political consultant working for Mr. Bankman-Fried.

The consultant is quoted in the indictment as telling the former FTX executive that he would be “giving to a lot of woke” causes “for transactional purposes,” using a profanity.

Two of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s former top executives at FTX, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, have already pleaded guilty and are cooperating with the investigation.

The new charges come less than a week after a federal judge who is overseeing Mr. Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar fraud case indicated that he was prepared to revoke his bail for his repeated testing of the boundaries set when Mr. Bankman-Fried was allowed to remain free but confined to the Palo Alto home of his parents with an ankle monitor, as part of $250 million bond package.

Prosecutors twice in recent weeks had asked the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, to curtail Mr. Bankman-Fried’s activities, asking that he be barred from using encrypted apps and to limit his ability to communicate with current and former FTX employees.

Kenneth Vogel contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/business/sam-bankman-fried-ftx.html