Securities fraud. SBF almost certainly misrepresented the company during negotiations with investors in its most recent fundraising attempts.
If his Twitter deception is anything to go by, he liked lied to investors about pilfering customer funds to bail out failed Alameda Research. Forget about lying, it's illegal to even withhold pertinent information when pitching to US investors.
The Bahamas is no safe haven. They will extradite. After all, his investors are in the US and those transactions are covered by SEC rules. Given the scale of the fraud here, this is serious jail time.
He could be saved by his political bribes, though, considering he's greased the palms of the current administration (#2 Democrat donator in the recent cycle) ;)
We don't know whether they misrepresented the situation or not.
But what we do know is that they had no Board of Directors and the level of independent oversight was completely inadequate given the sums of money involved.
If I was the SEC I would do nothing and simply remind investors like Sequoia of their responsibility to do basic due diligence. Because I really don't know how you can class them as professional investors given the level of incompetence.
There is serious money missing here (8-10bn) and serious connected investors that have been duped. I doubt his political donations will make a difference.
Best case scenario he was working with the cia and was helping them finance some of these donations or other stuff. Then they’ll arrange his disappearance in another country or the afterlife.
I always wonder about escape plans when people are doing really dodgy things with large amounts of money.
Do you come up with an escape plan when you start doing the thing you know is probably illegal and will definitely get you in serious trouble if it doesn't work?
Or do you just convince yourself it's gonna work, because it worked for long enough to convince you that you're too smart to fail?
I think I'd get me an extradition-proof mountaintop lair if I had even tens of millions and they were squeaky clean. Because you never know, right?
There's the case of Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president who fled to the airport in a SUV loaded with dollar bills embezzled from US aid, then realized they didn't all fit in the helicopter and had to leave half behind.
From all accounts this situation has moved far quicker than anyone expected.
There's tweets that say that CZ wasn't trying to tank FTX with his "I'm selling FTT" announcement but rather just wanted to fire a shot across the bow. And we should believe him when he says that this isn't good for him or the industry - because it really isn't.
And so in this case you have a few days to make a simple binary decision. Do you steal a few hundred million, bail to some country and hope you can live the next 50+ years without being extradited or risk staying in the US, being poor and spending the next 20+ years in jail.
Many people would happily roll the dice and pick the former option.
Of course you’d pick the former. You can’t save the world from a jail cell, and just think about all the people you’ll be able to help sitting on a cool billion, by the beach in a country with a no extradition policy.
If his Twitter deception is anything to go by, he liked lied to investors about pilfering customer funds to bail out failed Alameda Research. Forget about lying, it's illegal to even withhold pertinent information when pitching to US investors.
The Bahamas is no safe haven. They will extradite. After all, his investors are in the US and those transactions are covered by SEC rules. Given the scale of the fraud here, this is serious jail time.
He could be saved by his political bribes, though, considering he's greased the palms of the current administration (#2 Democrat donator in the recent cycle) ;)