Answers on whether FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will appear before two congressional committees next week are being made on Twitter.
In one early morning post on Twitter on Friday, Mr Bankman-Fried said he would appear on Tuesday before the House Committee on Financial Services after days of evasiveness on the issue. The hearing will focus on FTX’s sudden collapse last monthThe cryptocurrency exchange that Mr. Bankman-Fried founded, amid allegations of embezzlement of billions of customers’ coins.
Mr Bankman-Fried, 30, wrote in a Twitter post that “there is a limit to what I can say and I will not be as helpful as I would like to be.”
Since FTX and the companies associated with it filed for bankruptcy last month, Mr. Bankman-Fried was holed up in his residential complex in the Bahamas, where FTX’s headquarters are located. He has conducted numerous media interviews either live in the Bahamas or via Zoom to talk about the demise of the once popular cryptocurrency trading platform.
It is unclear whether he will appear in person before the House committee.
Mr Bankman-Fried did not address a separate request from the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urbanism to appear before the senators the next day.
In a letter sent Wednesday, the Senate committee gave Bankman-Fried has until 5 p.m. Thursday to respond to a request that he testify next Wednesday. Committee leaders released a statement on Thursday night saying Mr Bankman-Fried’s attorney had failed to comply with that deadline.
Senator Sherrod Brown, Ohio Democrat and committee chair, wrote in a letter to Bankman-Fried that if the crypto trader doesn’t want to speak to the committee, he’s ready to go. willing to issue a subpoena to force the person to testify.
Spokesperson Bankman-Fried and his attorney Mark Cohen declined to comment beyond the Twitter post. Representatives for the Senate committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Over the past two weeks, Mr. Bankman-Fried has been on a media tour, giving interviews to various news outlets and posting messages on Twitter. He has repeatedly said that he never intended to defraud anyone — not even the roughly one million FTX customers.
Mr. Bankman-Fried said he was not directly involved in trading decisions at Alameda Research, a hedge fund he co-founded and majority owned. Just before FTX filed for bankruptcy, it was revealed that billions of dollars of customer funds at the exchange had apparently been transferred to Alameda.
With federal prosecutors and the securities regulator investigating the collapse of FTX, the risk to Bankman-Fried in testifying before a congressional committee is far greater than when speaking to the public. the media. The statements he made to a reporter had no legal validity as his testimony before Congress.
Mr. Bankman-Fried is politically active raised about 40 million USD for federal campaigns and committees that primarily support the Democratic Party, according to Federal Election Commission records.
