Federal prosecutors filed four new charges Thursday against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as part of their criminal case against the former crypto prodigy.
The new 12-count substitution charge adds new bank fraud and money laundering counts to Bankman-Fried, as well as modified campaign finance charges. In the new document, prosecutors describe how Bankman-Fried and two unnamed defendants conspired to defraud the Federal Elections Commission by using straw donors to circumvent “contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom” the former CEO had already donated.
Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators allegedly organized the straw donor program into a Signal group chat called “Donation Processing”. The chat allegedly showed employees being directed to make large donations to groups such as the New York State Democratic Committee.
“In general, being the center-left face of our spending means you give a lot of waking shit for transactional purposes”
In one case, Bankman-Fried and the other unnamed defendants decided to donate at least $1 million to a pro-LGBT super PAC. “In general, the fact that you are the centre-left face of our spending means that you give a lot of money for transactional purposes,” a political adviser to Bankman-Fried is said to have said.
The suit alleges that the money used to make these donations came from Alameda bank accounts that held customer funds. Bankman-Fried, according to prosecutors, made more than 300 political contributions worth “tens of millions of dollars” as part of this straw donor program. The arrangement allowed Bankman-Fried to “circumvent contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom he had already donated,” according to the suit.
“As part of this plan, contributions were coordinated to be made in the name of two FTX donors to candidates they did not necessarily support or know” and were intended to advance Bankman-Fried’s “political agenda.”
After FTX collapsed last year, three leading Democratic campaign arms announced they would return more than $1 million in donations from Bankman-Fried. Still, FTX’s new management continues its efforts to recover money from customers. CNN reported this earlier this month the company sent “confidential messages” to campaigns and political groups calling on them to return donations before the end of February.
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