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The FTX Disaster is Deeper Than you Thin The Consumer You: Marketplace
Started Nov-22 by WALTER784; 5877 views.
Staff
From: WALTER784
Dec-28
Prosecutors Seeking Information On FTX Donations From Top Democrats
By Margaret Flavin
Published December 17, 2022 at 7:20pm
The Gateway Pundit reported on the recent SEC filing regarding FTX that failed to mention the amount of donations by FTX to corrupt politicians.
On Saturday, a source allegedly told The New York Times that top Democrat officials have been asked to provide information regarding donations from Sam Bankman-Fried and two former executives at disgraced cypto company.
The New York Post reports:
Prosecutors investigating accused crypto grifter Sam Bankman-Fried have demanded information from high-level Democrats — including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the incoming House minority leader — to help prove their sprawling case, according to a report.
Top Dem lawyer Marc E. Elias, who represents a long list of political campaigns and super PACs, received an email from the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York asking for details about donations received from Bankman-Fried, sources told the New York Times on Saturday.
Unnamed Republicans and other Democratic campaigns received similar messages, the sources said.
Bankman-Fried, 30, who was arrested in the Bahamas Monday on a raft of felony charges in the wake of the November collapse of his FTX crypto exchange, allegedly siphoned off $1.8 billion dollars of customer cash, using some of it to become the Democrats’ second-largest individual donor — behind billionaire businessman George Soros — in the 2022 election cycle.
Prosecutors Seeking Information On FTX Donations From Top Democrats (thegatewaypundit.com)
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
Dec-28
BREAKING: Secret Back Channel Between FTX and White House Closed the Day After FTX Filed for Bankruptcy
By Joe Hoft
Published December 24, 2022 at 1:50pm
A secret back channel between FTX and the Biden White House shut down the day after FTX filed for bankruptcy.
In November TGP reported that billions were sent to Ukraine from the US. Ukraine took some of this money and invested it in FTX. FTX took millions of dollars and invested them in US politicians.
The far-left Washington Post reported on March 3 that Ukraine was dealing in crypto.
The Ukrainian government has gathered more than $42 million in cryptocurrency donations since Saturday, plus digital artwork including a limited edition worth roughly $200,000, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. The challenge is how the country cashes in on these assets to fund its war needs.
Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman Fried has come forward to help a crypto donation project. He humbly announced that FTX will be supporting the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance and other communities in collecting crypto donations for the country. The Ukrainian government has received over $60 million in crypto donations from all over the world.
FTX’s CEO, Sam Bankman Fried highlighted that the war in Ukraine has been dragging on. The country is in full need of humanitarian help and access to global financial infrastructure. He also called attention to sanctions and crypto during this kind of situation. He indicated that crypto exchanges should enforce sanctions announced by the government seriously.
This was all laid out in our post.
Now we’ve learned that FTX and the Biden White House participated in a back channel that was closed the day after FTX went bankrupt.
This all came from a report at far-left Politico. They reported on Thursday that Democrat operative and close advisor to Bankman-Fried named Sean McElwee had a direct backchannel setup with the White House.
McElwee is a well-known progressive activist who started the “Abolish ICE” movement and in 2018 founded Data for Progress, a progressive think tank with an emphasis on influencing public policy through polling. DFP quickly embedded itself into the top layers of the Democratic firmament. More recently, McElwee became a close political ally and adviser to FTX founder SAM BANKMAN-FRIED. (They were connected through Shor, according to a friend of both men.)
McElwee had easy access to the White House and the press. And he made sure they had access to him. He kept an open Slack channel at DFP that became a rolling conversation between McElwee, Biden administration officials and some well-known reporters — a kind of JournoList for the early 2020s.
On Nov. 12, the day after FTX filed for bankruptcy and SBF resigned as CEO, McElwee abruptly shuttered the Slack channel. Six days later, he and Data for Progress began negotiating his exit from the firm he had built.
At the time, the reported reason for the rupture was that McElwee’s well-known penchant for betting on the outcomes of elections created a conflict of interest for a polling firm. A slew of 2022 DFP polls had a GOP bias, and activists on Twitter — as well as some prominent Democrats pinging reporters — asked whether McElwee was cooking DFP’s polls to affect races and cash in.
Sources at DFP insist that this would have been highly unlikely, and that their polls had a GOP bias because of an oversampling of respondents via SMS. In the wake of this, DFP recently adopted a previously unreported “Gambling and Wagering Policy” that prohibits employees from betting on anything related to DFP projects or clients.
The McElwee-DFP breakup was ugly, but the two sides were trying to negotiate an amicable separation agreement and a severance.
Then on Dec. 13, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed an eight-count indictment against SBF. The first seven counts, which were about financial crimes, garnered the most attention. But it was the eighth count that turned heads in Washington, alleging a straw-donor scheme in which SBF funneled corporate money to candidates and committees through third parties. And SDNY alleged that SBF had help: SBF “and others known and unknown,” the indictment says, made contributions “in the names of other persons.”
Bonchie at Red State shares:
...[Message truncated]
Staff
From: WALTER784
Dec-30
SBF's former associates plead guilty to fraud, cooperating now
Accused of 'active role in a scheme to misuse customer assets'
By WND News Services
Published December 22, 2022 at 10:03am
Former business associates of disgraced former crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have pleaded guilty to the charges brought against them and are cooperating with the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, according to a statement by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams Wednesday.
Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda research and reportedly ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to seven counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, while Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX and former chief technology officer, pleaded guilty to four counts, including wire fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing plea agreements. Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC) brought charges for securities fraud against the pair, alleging that they were “active participants” in Bankman-Fried’s efforts to defraud investors on FTX, according to a complaint filed by the SEC Wednesday.
“As part of their deception, we allege that Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried schemed to manipulate the price of FTT, an exchange crypto security token that was integral to FTX, to prop up the value of their house of cards,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler in a press release. “We further allege that Ms. Ellison and Mr. Wang played an active role in a scheme to misuse FTX customer assets to prop up Alameda and to post collateral for margin trading. When FTT and the rest of the house of cards collapsed, Mr. Bankman-Fried, Ms. Ellison, and Mr. Wang left investors holding the bag.”
Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on Dec. 12, pending extradition to the United States, on charges that included wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. The SEC also brought separate charges against Bankman-Fried on Dec. 13, alleging that he orchestrated a scheme to use billions of customer assets from FTX to fund trades made by Alameda Research.
Unconfirmed photos of Ellison appeared to show her getting coffee at a shop near the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, fueling speculation that she may be cooperating with authorities.
Williams confirmed that Bankman-Fried was in the custody of the FBI and en route to the U.S., and thanked Bahamian authorities and U.S. law enforcement agencies for the “team effort” to bring Bankman-Fried in. Williams also called on any other perpetrators to come forward.
“If you participated in misconduct at FTX or Alameda, now is the time to get ahead of it,” he said. “We are moving quickly, and our patience is not eternal.”
SBF's former associates plead guilty to fraud, cooperating now (wnd.com)
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
Dec-30
Bankrupt FTX Can Only Locate $1.5 Billion in Assets – Doesn’t Know How Much It Owes or How Many Employees It Has
By Joe Hoft
Published December 20, 2022 at 6:25pm
Bankrupt FTX announced today that it was able to locate around $1.5 billion in assets worldwide.
FTX went bankrupt a couple of months ago. The company was involved with millions going to corrupt mostly Democrat politicians.
We also quickly learned that FTX was involved in Ukraine and the Ukraine government had invested in FTX with money sent to Ukraine from the US.
We know FTX was used as a conduit to move money from Ukraine to US politicians. We don’t know how much.
The new leadership in FTX is trying to get their arms around how much money the company has and how much it lost.
FTX executives are currently trying to claw back hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from hundreds of bank accounts as they seek to resolve the position of the collapsed crypto exchange, its creditors were told Tuesday.
The company’s new management, which took over when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried resigned Nov. 11, told a procedural hearing on Tuesday that it had over $1 billion in assets identified. The company located about $720 million in cash assets, which the exchange has yet to consolidate, in U.S. financial institutions authorized to hold funds by the U.S. Department of Justice. Another near $500 million is already being held in U.S. institutions.
“We are reaching out to all of those banks and changing the signatories on the accounts so that we can get access to the accounts and move the cash as much as we can to authorized depository institutions,” FTX’s new chief financial officer, Mary Cilia, speaking under oath, said during part of bankruptcy proceedings.
The management at FTX reportedly has no idea what is going on at the company.
The Chapter 11 bankruptcy hearings aim to wind up the exchange, but have been complicated by supposedly weak governance and poor record keeping under Bankman-Fried’s reign. The company’s new management were having to review customer terms and conditions that were stored in a variety of places such as Google Drive and Slack, Coverick said.
The company has still not filed a statement of assets or of its financial position required under U.S. bankruptcy law, and currently estimates it will be able to do so in April, Cilia said. The company is still trying to sort out how many employees it has worldwide – Cilia estimated the figure at 220 – and how much was withdrawn leading up to the bankruptcy.
We don’t even know how much they owe. We need to find someone who knows QuickBooks.
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
Dec-30
I highly doubt that most people will get paid... either investors or employees... because there is hardly no cash or a minus cash figure remaining.
FWIW
Host
From: Showtalk
Dec-30
It’s unfair but anyone who dumps money into a shady operation takes a risk.
Staff
From: WALTER784
Jan-5
Reports of a quarter-billion-dollar 'bond' for Bankman-Fried are almost as fraudulent as the crimes of which he is accused
By Thomas Lifson
December 23, 2022
The public is being bamboozled about the conditions for pretrial release of accused mega-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
It is the worst possible signal to those who fear that his scores of millions of dollars of political donations have bought him kid-glove treatment by the judicial system.
The stories you read and hear from the media would have you believe that a “record” bail of $250 million has been paid to ensure that he doesn’t flee the country or otherwise evade prosecution. Where that figure comes from, I don’t know, but this account from The Hill suggests that the federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York had a hand in it:
At the request of prosecutors, Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Gabriel Gorenstein agreed to the bond price and said Bankman-Fried can reside at his parent’s home in Palo Alto, Calif., ahead of the trial, according to The Associated Press.
Bankman-Fried stated in an interview with Andrew Ross-Sorkin of the New York Times at a public event that he had about $100,000 in funds available, so he was incapable of posting any bond beyond that amount. And it turns out, it was his parents who signed a lien on their equity in their home in Palo Alto, California to guarantee payment of the quarter billion-dollar bond should Bankman-Fried forfeit his bond by fleeing to Dubai or some other trick.
Palo Alto real estate is extremely expensive, but I seriously doubt that their home is worth more than a small percent of the publicized amount of the bond. But the media mostly do not report this fact, or if they do, they bury it.
For example, twenty-five paragraphs into the New York Times account of the release of Bankman-Fried hours after his return from the Bahamas – headlined “Sam Bankman-Fried Released on $250 Million Bond With Restrictions” -- we read:
Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried are not actually paying $250 million to have Mr. Bankman-Fried released. But in theory, they would be liable for that amount if their son fled, and their house could be seized.
That directly contradicts the headline, but only a few “conspiracy theorists” are likely to notice.
Also, it has been reported that his parents have purchased real estate worth eight or even nine figures, and that his father was for a time employed by FTX.
Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, his parents and senior executives of the failed cryptocurrency exchange bought at least 19 properties worth nearly $121 million in the Bahamas over the past two years, official property records show. (snip)
The documents for another home with beach access in Old Fort Bay -- a gated community that was once home to a British colonial fort built in the 1700s to protect against pirates -- show Bankman-Fried's parents, Stanford University law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories. The property, one of the documents dated June 15 said, is for use as a "vacation home."
That raises the question of whether or not their real estate purchases were financed through fraudulent activity of the sort that Bankman-Fried is accused of. Law professors at Stanford University no doubt make handsome salaries that can be supplemented by outside consulting. But such activities are unlikely to yield amounts to pay for such properties. It is reasonable to ask if such purchases would make the parents co-conspirators in the fraud of which their son is accused.
The fact that the media are trumpeting a phony amount for pretrial release bond and that the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the judge in the case, federal magistrate Gabriel W. Gorenstein – a former chief of the civil rights unit in that same Southern District of New York prosecutors’ office -- have enabled this misreporting suggests that Bankman-Fried is getting treatment commensurate with the political influence his donations evidently sought to purchase.
FWIW
Host
From: Showtalk
Jan-5
They used money earned fraudulently to release him. Maybe they will all flee.
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