A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a proposal to modify the bail conditions of Sam Bankman-Fried, despite a deal between the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and prosecutors to address potential witness tampering concerns. gave
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan did not provide reasons for the denial and said a bail hearing was scheduled for Thursday.
A spokesman for Bankman-Fried declined to comment. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ office in Manhattan also declined to comment.
Bankman Fried, 30, is free on $250 million bond and living in Palo Alto, Calif., with his parents, who posted the bond, as he pleads guilty to stealing billions of dollars from the now-bankrupt FTX. no.
On Tuesday afternoon, he formally appealed Kaplan’s Jan. 30 decision to grant requests from 11 media outlets, including Reuters, to release the names of two other people who guaranteed his bail. .
Bankman-Fried has said that her parents, both Stanford Law School professors, had been harassed and physically threatened since the end of FTX, and had “grave cause for concern” that the same would happen with additional guarantors. It can be behavior.
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Prosecutors last month asked for the bail to be increased, citing efforts by Bankman Fried to contact both the general counsel of the FTX US affiliate and John Ray, the new FTX chief executive, ostensibly to offer assistance. .
Their proposed terms would bar Bankman-Fried from speaking with FTX or most of its Alameda Research hedge fund employees without lawyers present, or using signals such as encrypted messaging apps.
On Monday, Mark Cohen, a lawyer for Bankman-Fried, said his client and prosecutors would allow conversations with a certain set of employees pending Kaplan’s approval.
The deal would also ban Bankman Freud from using the signal, but allow him to communicate via phone, email, text message, Zoom and FaceTime, as well as WhatsApp if he installed the monitoring technology.
Bankman-Fried may have also withdrawn its objection to a bail condition barring it from accessing FTX, Alameda or cryptocurrency assets.
His lawyers had originally proposed barring contact only with certain potential witnesses, such as former Alameda chief Carolyn Ellison and former FTX Technology chief Zixiao “Gary” Wang, who have admitted to fraud and Cooperating with the prosecution.
Separately, prosecutors on Tuesday asked another judge to stay the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission civil cases against Bankman Freud pending the conclusion of the criminal case.
They cited substantial overlap of cases, and Bankman-Fried could gather evidence in civil cases to aid his criminal defense.
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