Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested Monday in the Bahamas after U.S. prosecutors filed an indictment against him.
“Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
FTX and Bankman-Fried have been under investigation by U.S. law enforcement agencies after his company imploded in November, losing billions of dollars of its customers’ money. He was slated to testify in front of a congressional committee Tuesday.
Bankman-Fried has spent the past few weeks in his Bahamas estate, giving numerous interviews to reporters and making dozens of social media posts trying explain how his company went from being one of the biggest and most-respected crypto exchanges to filing for bankruptcy.
Earlier Monday, John J. Ray, the court-appointed executive charged with overseeing FTX during the bankruptcy process, wrote in prepared remarks for the congressional testimony that the company had been run with “gross mismanagement, excessive leverage” and “failures of internal controls.”
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
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