Bankman-Fried Seeks to Block Prosecutors Calling FTX Investors, Former Insiders as Witnesses

Former crypto brag Sam Bankman-Fried wants to halt the authorities from calling aggregate witnesses, including institution investors and a Ukrainian lawsuit near bereft by the illness of his FTX exchange, according to tribunal filings made conscionable hours earlier his proceedings is owed to begin.

Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not blameworthy to aggregate counts of fraud aft FTX filed for bankruptcy successful November, doesn’t privation erstwhile institution insiders testifying astir the meaning of supposedly “coded” expressions utilized arsenic portion of an alleged conspiracy to misuse lawsuit funds.

While prosecutors astatine the U.S. Department of Justice privation erstwhile customers and investors to attest astir however they understood FTX would safeguard their assets, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Mark Cohen said successful a filing made nationalist Tuesday that the petition was “premature,” and would punctual members of the assemblage to conclusions they should gully for themselves.

The DOJ “asks the Court to licence percipient witnesses to connection their ain opinions and interpretations connected issues that the assemblage indispensable measure from the nonsubjective position of a tenable person,” a determination for which there’s nary ineligible basis, Cohen said, adding that the defence should astatine slightest beryllium capable to cross-question immoderate authorities witnesses.

A projected Ukrainian FTX lawsuit who the authorities says mislaid a important information of his beingness savings connected the exchange, and who cannot permission the country, should not beryllium allowed to attest remotely, and had been picked lone to make the jury’s “sympathy and outrage” linked to the war, Cohen said successful an earlier, Monday night filing.

Cohen besides accused the authorities of “gamesmanship” for seeking to telephone adept investors aft Judge Lewis Kaplan blocked Bankman-Fried’s own projected witnesses, and said that the meaning of Bankman-Fried’s words doesn’t request to beryllium explained to the assemblage by the erstwhile FTX insiders who are cooperating with prosecutors.

While the DOJ does not sanction the alleged co-conspirators it wants to telephone to connection those explanations, it's apt to notation to colleagues and friends specified arsenic Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s erstwhile romanticist spouse and ex-head of FTX’s hedge money limb Alameda Research.

The trial, whose archetypal signifier volition prime assemblage members, starts connected Tuesday astatine 9:30 a.m. Eastern clip successful a little Manhattan courthouse.