While creditors of cryptocurrency exchange FTX will seek to recoup their losses, those who have received money from disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried — especially politicians who accepted his donations — must pay it back, Judge Janine Pirro said on Wednesday.
Still, Pirro admits it will be difficult to get the money back at the Five.
“This money is fraudulent money. This is dirty money. And it was part of a fraudulent scheme,” he said. “And then this scheme, I think, is bigger than anything we’ve seen in this country. So let’s not fool each other. The money needs to be returned,” he said.
Pirro also said the $300 million in spending by the SBF in the Bahamas should be considered. He appeared to appeal New York Post report Bankman-Fried “withdrew” at least $300 million from FTX before its collapse. According to bankruptcy filings released by the Post and Reuters, some of those funds went toward a $16 million vacation home for his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, in the Old Fort Bay community of New Providence Island. used to buy – an exclusive area near Lynden Pindling International Airport. from the busy and touristy downtown Nassau.
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Sam Bankman-Fried testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, Dec. 8, 2021.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
State and federal bankruptcy laws further complicate recovery efforts, Pirro said, citing the number of 1 million creditors who “have been robbed of $1.8 billion.”
Pirro also talked about Bankman-Fried’s spending, calling the investor a “scoundrel” who seemed to know “something was coming” before FTX collapsed.
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Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX, speaks at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) annual membership meeting in Washington, DC.
(Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“That’s why he started putting a lot of money into newspapers and giving them to reporters because he was trying to buy them,” Pirro said.
“He said, ‘Oh, I just want an honest and fair media, an honest journalist and an honest fourth estate.
“Now he has about 300 million dollars [The Bahamas] he tried to get away, like most wealthy defendants, if he got away and used the money to change his identity. So did Robert Durst,” he added, referring to the real estate mogul who was convicted of murder.
During Durst’s 2021 deposition, he responded to a defense question that he “hid from Janine Pirro” in 2000 — when he was the Republican DA in White Plains and was investigating Kathleen Durst’s disappearance.
At Five, Pirro added that no one should care about Bankman-Fried’s objections to being held in the filthy prisons of a vegan, ADD-driven island nation.
“I don’t care, and neither do any other red-blooded American,” he said. “My concern is in the Bahamas: it’s better for him to stay there. I don’t want to hear that he flew away, that they can’t find him now, or that he killed himself.”