Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-defunct crypto firm FTX, has been accused of authorizing a bribe of at least $40m to gain access to trading accounts frozen by Chinese authorities, according to new charges unveiled in the US.
Bankman-Fried had already been charged with fraud after FTX’s collapse last year, but these new allegations have added to his legal woes.
Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is currently under house arrest at his parent’s home in California while awaiting trial.
The updated indictment states that Bankman-Fried authorized the bribe after Chinese authorities froze accounts holding approximately $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency that belonged to his trading firm, Alameda Research.
The accounts were eventually released after the transfer was made to a private cryptocurrency wallet, according to the filing.
The alleged bribe followed months of other efforts to access the frozen funds, which Bankman-Fried believed were held as part of an investigation into another trading firm.
The incident happened before FTX’s dramatic collapse last year, when reports about the company’s finances led to a rush of withdrawals, pushing the firm into bankruptcy.
In the aftermath of the collapse, which left many people unable to access their funds, the US filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, accusing him of improperly using customer deposits at FTX to fund his other firm, Alameda Research.
