The founder and former boss of the Sam Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency exchange platform “will leave the Bahamas this evening” to be handed over to American authorities, the Bahamas Minister of Justice said in a statement carried by several local media on Wednesday. .
• Read also: Sam Bankman-Fried, the ex-boss of FTX, charged with fraud by the American justice
• Read also: Fallen Cryptocurrency Star and Ex-FTX Boss Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested in the Bahamas
“SBF”, his nickname, “has waived the right to challenge his extradition to the United States”, recalled Ryan Pinder. The Bahamian authorities noted that this renunciation allowed his extradition under the terms of a treaty binding the Bahamas and the United States.
Earlier Wednesday, Sam Bankman-Fried agreed to be extradited during a hearing in Nassau.
The 30-year-old entrepreneur is “can’t wait to go and if it might be done today, it would be perfect,” Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bahamian lawyer Jerone Roberts told Judge Shaka Serville, according to the local daily. The Nassau Guardian.
At the hearing, he expressed his “desire to ensure that affected customers get their money back,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Sam Bankman-Fried was to fly in the evening to New York, where he will appear before another judge in Manhattan federal court.
Once the New York magistrate has served him with the charges once morest him, the former darling of the cryptocurrency world should be placed in custody in New York, pending trial.
Until last year, defendants in pretrial detention who depended on the Manhattan federal court were housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), located in the southern tip of the island.
But the site closed in 2021, officially temporarily. He had been the subject of repeated complaints alleging unsanitary conditions of detention.
His reputation had also been tarnished by the suicide, in August 2019, in an MCC cell, of Jeffrey Epstein, accused of having created and maintained a pedophile network.
Sam Bankman-Fried might therefore be sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, also denounced for its lack of staff and questionable management of detainees.
Arrested on December 12 in Nassau, Sam Bankman-Fried is already in detention in the Bahamas.
He is accused of having used funds deposited by clients of the FTX platform to carry out, without their knowledge, risky transactions via another company he also controlled, Alameda Research.
He is also suspected of having invested part of this money in real estate in the Bahamas and dedicated another portion to donations to Democratic politicians, in particular Joe Biden during his presidential campaign.
Five of the eight charges once morest him each provide for a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The one who has long been seen as an iconoclastic genius of cryptocurrencies is therefore likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.
