SAM THE SCAM THE BANKERS MAN …BAKE ME SOME “BREAD” FAST AS YOU CAN

ANON

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From JC

Sam Bankman-Fried, notorious founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, was scheduled to testify Tuesday before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services. But late Monday afternoon, he was arrested in the Bahamas, at the request of the U.S. government.

On Tuesday, Newsmax ran a story headlined, “FTX Founder Denied Bail in the Bahamas.” Whoops!

Bahamas Chief Magistrate JoyAnn Ferguson-Pratt denied bushy-headed Sam Bankman-Fried’s petition to be released on bail, citing a “great” risk of flight — you don’t say — and ordered the former FTX CEO to be holed up with the Caribbean nation’s department of corrections until February 8th.

Sam, 30, protested the decision, telling Chief Magistrate Ferguson-Pratt that he couldn’t go to jail, mostly because he is vegan, and also because he’s ‘depressed.’ His Stanford law professor mother, Barbara, laughed when prosecutors described Sam as a ‘fugitive’. Sam also denied that he’d ever done anything wrong, and told the court he was planning to tell Congress that he could repay all of the people who have lost money ‘tomorrow’ if his assets are unfrozen, despite previously filing for bankruptcy.

Sam will be visiting with a nice facility known as Fox Hill, the Bahamas’ only prison. The UK Daily Mail described the jail as being well-known for overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, even describing it as a “third world hellhole.”

But politicians breathed a sigh of relief at Bankman-Fried’s timely arrest on Monday, which helpfully prevented him from testifying before Congress on Tuesday. The SEC’s criminal complaint, also filed the day before his scheduled testimony also helpfully gives Sam a new Miranda defense against any self-incriminating testimony — a defense which didn’t exist before the complaint had been filed.

It’s surprising how aggressively DOJ prosecutors moved to stop Sam from making any self-incriminating statements in his sworn Congressional testimony, which would have been admissible and likely extremely useful to prosecutors at trial, had they just waited one more day. Normally, prosecutors LOVE letting criminal defendants talk.

Not this time. Shut up, Sam!

During the Congressional hearing, which proceeded without the benefit of Sam’s testimony, the court-appointed Chapter 11 restructuring officer testified that the multi-billion-dollar company was using QUICKBOOKS to keep track of its finances.

I didn’t know that the data entry forms in Quickbooks even had room for numeric entries in the billions. It’s laughable, of course. But note that Quickbooks is well-known for allowing users to change entries without any audit trail.

So.

Forbes ran a story Tuesday headlined, “Exclusive Transcript: The Full Testimony Bankman-Fried Planned To Give To Congress.” Somehow Forbes “obtained” a personal copy of the testimony Sam planned to give and ran the 18-page Opus verbatim on Forbes’ website. Weird.

It begins, ironically, or maybe characteristically, with an undignified f-bomb:

I would like to start by formally stating under oath: I f****d up. I know that it doesn’t mean much to say that I’m sorry. And so I’m dedicating as much of myself as I can to do the right thing by customers.
When all is said and done, I’ll judge myself primarily by one metric: whether I have eventually been able to make customers whole. If I fail our customers in this regard, I have failed myself.
He’s delusional. Sam claimed he just wanted to help people:

As a believer in the Effective Altruism movement, my primary goal has never been personal enrichment; I’m motivated by a commitment to help bring happiness and alleviate suffering for others. My personal charitable donations, which started in 2014 when I was working on Wall Street, vastly outstrip what’s left in my bank account.
He claimed $100K was left in his bank account. So, it’s not really saying much to claim he charitably donated (gaining tax exemptions) more than that.

Sam also denied, obliquely, that there was any funny business with the Ukraine connection or, presumably, the DNC:

Any theory that I conspired with the Government of Ukraine to do anything other than what I stated I was doing—creating pathways for contributions to Ukrainians and to their defense—is not just false, but deeply offensive. Any theories that a US political party was further involved in such a conspiracy are themselves categorically false and offensive.
Oh, it’s offensive all right.

In his carefully written testimony, Sam claimed that he was falsely-accused of hard partying, explaining that “our parties were mostly dinner and board games.” Uh huh.

The totally-unqualified, mysteriously-financed, drug-addled former CEO, who often bragged about playing idiotic cellphone games during important business meetings, did not precisely blame himself for the collapse of FTX. He MOSTLY blamed: a competitor who failed to buy FTX at the last minute, his bankruptcy attorneys, the court-appointed restructuring officer, FTX’s general counsel, and bugs in FTX’s software and accounting system that failed to show him the growing risks on his “dashboard.”

“My periodic assessments of the riskiness of our positions were often based on the dashboard’s numbers,” Sam explained helpfully.

Danged software bugs.

Remarkably, Sam claimed in his statement that FTX “has been and remains solvent,” and could pay back all his customers “tomorrow,” except that his bankruptcy lawyers were conspiring to steal it all for themselves in attorney’s fees. Greedy lawyers!

Sam’s opinions about FTX’s solvency are, as we say, “at variance with the facts.”

It’s nice that Sam got to publish his written statement, not under oath, and didn’t have to answer any questions about it.