Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial is done, and he was found guilty on seven charges. But it’s not over yet for the former FTX CEO.
Bankman-Fried won’t be sentenced till March 28, but he also has a second trial, currently scheduled for March 11, where he faces additional charges, including for foreign bribery. The U.S. Department of Justice has until February 1 to decide whether it plans to proceed with that trial. Brendan Quigley, a former prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, thinks prosecutors will proceed with that case.
A “kind of conventional wisdom” would think the federal prosecutors and Bankman-Fried would agree on a settlement, but Quigley said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast that there could be challenges to that.
“I think you could see some push from the SDNY not to just walk away from these charges,” Quigley said. Bankman-Fried isn’t in a position to plead guilty, either — and probably won’t — seeing as how he’s going to appeal his current conviction.
During the SBF trial, former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison testified that the crypto trading firm paid Chinese officials to get their Alameda trading accounts on OKX and Huobi in China unlocked. Bankman-Fried was CEO in 2020 when the accounts, valued around $1 billion, were frozen, Ellison testified.
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While Judge Lewis Kaplan noted at the time that the defendant has not been charged in the first case with bribery of Chinese officials, it is a major claim that could be brought up if there’s a second trial.
The main event to come will be the sentencing and seeing how arguments shape up in connection to them, Quigley said. “At the end of the day, for him every year matters,” and it will continue to be an “uphill battle” for the former billionaire.
This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch’s podcast Chain Reaction. Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to hear more stories and tips from the entrepreneurs building today’s most innovative companies.
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