(New York) Founder and former boss of cryptocurrency exchange platform Sam Bankman-Fried agreed to be extradited to the United States during a hearing on Wednesday in Nassau, Bahamas, several local media reported. and Americans.
The 30-year-old entrepreneur is ‘can’t wait to go and if it could be done today it would be perfect,’ Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bahamian lawyer Jerone Roberts told Judge Shaka Serville, according to the local daily. The Nassau Guardian.
“SBF”, his nickname, has agreed not to challenge his extradition, a decision approved by the judge and which should lead to the surrender of the defendant to the American authorities.
At the hearing, he expressed his “desire to ensure that affected customers get their money back”, according to the wall street journal.
Sam Bankman-Fried could be extradited on Wednesday and fly to New York, where he will appear before another judge in Manhattan federal court.
Once the New York magistrate has served him with the charges against him, the former darling of the cryptocurrency world should be placed in custody in New York, pending trial.
Until last year, defendants in pretrial detention who depended on the Manhattan federal court were housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), located in the southern tip of the island.
But the site closed in 2021, officially temporarily. He had been the subject of repeated complaints alleging unsanitary conditions of detention.
His reputation had also been tarnished by the suicide, in August 2019, in an MCC cell, of Jeffrey Epstein, accused of having created and maintained a pedophile network.
Sam Bankman-Fried could therefore be sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, also denounced for its lack of staff and questionable management of detainees.
Arrested on December 12 in Nassau, Sam Bankman-Fried is already in detention in the Bahamas.
Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of having used funds deposited by clients of the FTX platform to carry out, without their knowledge, risky transactions through another company he also controlled, Alameda Research.
He is also suspected of having invested some of this money in real estate in the Bahamas and dedicated another portion to donations to Democratic politicians, including Joe Biden during his presidential campaign.
Five of the eight charges against him each provide for a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The one who has long been seen as an iconoclastic genius of cryptocurrencies is therefore likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.