Disgraced FTX Founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried, who is set to plead not guilty in a New York court on Tuesday, has reportedly asked the judge to keep his bail guarantors a secret. SBF’s lawyers argued that there is “no need for public disclosure” of who is paying to keep the crypto kingpin accused of fraud out of jail.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers argued that there is “no need for public disclosure” of the identities of two people who will help secure the disgraced FTX founder’s bail in order to protect them from potential scrutiny and harassment, according to a report by Bloomberg.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (second on left) is led away in handcuffs by officers of the Royal Bahamas Police Force in Nassau, Bahamas, on December 13, 2022. (MARIO DUNCANSON/AFP via Getty Images)
The lawyers filed a letter asking the judge to keep the names confidential on Tuesday. Bankman-Fried’s bail package is $250 million.
“If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny, and potentially targeted for harassment, despite having no substantive connection to the case,” Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said.
“Consequently, the privacy and safety of the sureties are ‘countervailing factors’ that significantly outweigh the presumption of public access to the very limited information at issue,” the lawyers added.
The judge reportedly asked that in addition to Bankman-Fried and his parents, the bond be signed by at least two other people of “considerable means,” one of whom cannot be a relative.
The FTX founder’s lawyers said that while the two people have yet to sign on, they plan to before the January 5 deadline.
Bloomberg noted that requesting anonymity for sureties is not unusual, citing convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, whose lawyers asked to conceal the names of those willing to sign her bail bond, as well as Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, whose lawyers were able to get a judge to reduce the number of co-signers on his bail bond from four to two, arguing that they were unable to get anyone other than his wife and brother to sign off on it.
After FTX filed for bankruptcy, the company’s new CEO John Ray, III revealed several wild and shocking items found in the filing, whch included Bankman-Fried allegedly lending himself $1 billion, as well as FTX corporate funds being used to buy personal homes, among other things.
FTX collapsed in November after Bankman-Fried told investors that the cryptocurrency company was facing a major shortfall of up to $8 billion from withdrawal requests and needed emergency funding.
After FTX filed for bankruptcy the disgraced founder announced his resignation, adding that Alameda Research would be shutting down. Bankman-Fried then put his 12,000-square ft. penthouse in the Bahamas up for sale.
In just the course of one week in November, Bankman-Fried went from having an estimated net worth of $16 billion to being completely broke, with Bloomberg referring to the incident as “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth.”
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