Caribbean News
Ignorance or Corruption; only court can judge SBF
By Dana Malcolm
Staff Writer
#USA, December 26, 2022 – Sam Bankman-Fried has landed in the United States after agreeing to be extradited and faced US courts on Thursday. Since the beginning of the collapse of FTX the founder and former CEO had maintained his innocence.
In twitter posts in the immediate days after the collapse when thoughts of a hack were still floating around and the public was yet to learn of the extent of mismanagement he had said,
“I’m piecing together all of the details, but I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier this week. I will, soon, write up a more complete post on the play by play, but I want to make sure that I get it right when I do.” he added “My goal—my one goal—is to do right by customers.— I’m meeting in-person with regulators and working with the teams to do what we can for customers. And after that, investors. But first, customers.”
He detailed his own version of what had happened on twitter. SBF presented the issue in its simplest form, as basically the company being overdrawn, with more money leaving its coffers than was supposed to. Seemingly contrite, he has consistently claimed innocence and ignorance about the massive mistakes that were made at his own company, but emphasized that he was doing everything to get his customers their money, making statements like this.
“I was on the cover of every magazine, and FTX was the darling of Silicon Valley. We got overconfident and careless— I had thought of myself as a model CEO, who wouldn’t become lazy or disconnected. Which made it that much more destructive when I did. I’m sorry. Hopefully people can learn from the difference between who I was and who I
He maintained that even his extradition was for the benefit of his customers. Through his twitter posts Bankman-Fried is portraying himself as the picture of remorse. It’s at odds with the revelations of the Congressional hearing on December 13th which new CEO John Ray III attended. Ray shared incredible mismanagement and next to no protection of customer funds painting a picture of cross company trading and other gross negligence that should never have happened. Bankman-Fried did not mention the gaping holes in company policy or record keeping in his numerous twitter posts.
Al Green, Chairman of Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Panelist in the congressional hearing on FTX’s collapse said this
“Mr. Bankman-Fried has pretty much indicated that he just made a big mistake and that he was doing the best that h could to be a servant of a great service to humankind.” referencing SBF’s impressive background in schooling he said “It looks to me like there may be some maleficence here– I find it hard to believe we are dealing with conscientious stupidity. It seems to me that you have to be really talented to do all of these things to the extent that they were done and to do them successfully for as long as he was able to accomplish these things. They just don’t emanate from ignorance and stupidity.– it just seems to me that we are dealing with more than sincere ignorance.”
He put the question to Ray who said they were still investigating and would have more information at a later date.
As for Bankman-Fried, whether his hands are clean or he is pulling off the con of the century will be up to the US Justice system to find out, at least two other executives have plead guilty to criminal charges.