NASSAU (Reuters) -Former FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces fraud charges in the United States over the collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, is expected to appear in court in the Bahamas on Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said.
Another person with knowledge of Bankman-Fried’s plans told Reuters he had decided not to fight extradition to New York, where federal prosecutors last week charged him with using stolen FTX customer funds to plug losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research.
Neither a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan nor Bankman-Fried’s U.S. defense lawyer, Mark Cohen, immediately responded to requests for comment.
On Monday, Bankman-Fried appeared in court in capital Nassau after Reuters and other outlets reported over the weekend that he had decided to agree to extradition. But during the tumultuous hearing, a Bahamas lawyer for Bankman-Fried said his client wanted to see the U.S. indictment against him before consenting to leaving the Caribbean nation.
The 30-year-old cryptocurrency mogul was arrested last Monday in the Bahamas, where he lives and where FTX is based, under a U.S. arrest warrant. He said at his initial court appearance on Tuesday that he would contest extradition while appealing a Bahamas magistrate’s decision to deny him bail.
He has since been detained at Nassau’s Fox Hill prison, marking a stunning fall from grace for Bankman-Fried. Once a billionaire several times over, he has been under increasing scrutiny since a flurry of customer withdrawals from FTX amid concerns over commingling of their funds with Alameda.
The exchange declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO the same day. In a string of media appearances that acknowledged risk-management failures at FTX, he said he does not believe he has criminal liability.
(Reporting by Jared Higgs in Nassau,Additional reporting and writing by Luc Cohen in New York, editing by Ed Osmond and Nick Zieminski)
