FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried will testify before a U.S. House committee on Tuesday, the cryptocurrency exchange’s founder and the congressional panel said Friday while regulators probe his role after the collapse.
House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters told Reuters Thursday she was prepared to subpoena Bankman-Fried if he did not agree to appear before the panel holding a hearing as part of his investigation FTX.
In a statement late Friday, the panel said it would hear from newly appointed FTX CEO John Ray and from Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder and former CEO, on Tuesday.
“I still don’t have access to a lot of my data – professionally or privately. As such, there is a limit to what I can say and I will not be as helpful as I would like,” Bankman-Fried said on Twitter on Friday.
“But since the committee still thinks it would be useful, I’m ready to testify on the 13th,” he added.
The hybrid hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET (8:30 p.m. IST), the committee said.
In recent weeks, US authorities have been soliciting information from investors and potential investors in FTX, two sources with knowledge of the inquiries told Reuters. Prosecutors and regulators have not charged Bankman-Fried with any crime.
U.S. Department of Justice officials met with FTX’s court-appointed overseers this week to investigate whether hundreds of millions of dollars were improperly transferred to the Bahamas, where FTX is based, around the same time the crypto exchange opened in Delaware filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg reported late Friday.
Both FTX and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the report.
Fight against crypto pioneers
FTX filed for bankruptcy last month and Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive after traders siphoned $6 billion (around Rs. 50,000) from the platform and a competing exchange in three days binance gave up a rescue contract.
Reuters last month detailed the bitter rivalry between Bankman-Fried and Binance Chief Executive Changpeng Zhao, who had been battling for market share in the months leading up to FTX’s fall.
Public tension between the two erupted again on Friday after a series of tweets from Zhao.
Zhao said that after Binance, an early investor in FTX, tried to exit its holding over a year and a half ago, Bankman-Fried launched “offensive tirades” against Binance team members.
Binance sold back its stake in the company to FTX last year.
In response, Bankman-Fried wrote, “We entered into discussions to purchase from you and made the decision to do so because it was important to our business.”
“They threatened to leave at the last minute if we didn’t throw in an extra ~$75 million (around Rs 600 million),” he added. “You didn’t even have the right to withdraw as an investor unless we decided to buy you out – much of the token/equity was still locked up.”
“Not that it matters now. You also can’t force us to sell if we don’t want to,” Zhao replied.
“It was never a competition or a fight. Nobody won.”
© Thomson Reuters 2022
