Five of thirteen charges against Sam Bankman-Fried in relation to the financial collapse of FTX have been withdrawn by federal prosecutors.
A caveat to this is that the prosecutors have requested a second trial in early 2024 for the charges that were initiated earlier in the year. Bankman-Fried's lawyers argued that the additional indictments violate the conditions of his extradition and filed for a judicial review with the Supreme Court of the Bahamas on June 13.
Originally charged with only eight counts out of the thirteen, the five charges being withdrawn were added after Bankman-Fried was extradited from the Bahamas to the United States last December. The charges include bank fraud and allegations of bribing a foreign government.
Federal prosecutors said they would not pursue the new charges unless the government of the Bahamas authorized them. They told the Wall Street Journal, “The government will proceed on the new charges…if The Bahamas consents to trial on these charges, and will not proceed on those counts if The Bahamas denies the Government’s request.”
Last Wednesday, the prosecutors said that the reason for this request was to "simplify the proof at trial and decrease the burden of trial preparation” for Bankman-Fried.
Bankman-Fried's lawyers have argued that the new charges violate the rules of the extradition treaty between the US and the Bahamas. The extradition treaty states that countries must consent to any charges brought after the extradition takes place.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, the Manhattan judge in charge of the decision, when given the argument from Bankman-Fried's lawyers, called it "extraordinarily imaginative."
Bankman Fried allegedly stole billions of dollars from FTX customers while committing numerous counts of fraud. FTX was a corporation that controlled a huge amount of capital in the form of cryptocurrency that went under in 2022.
After his original arrest, Bankman-Fried was transferred to the US after being taken into custody in the Bahamas, where FTX was headquartered.
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