- Sam Bankman-Fried has been hit with new charges over alleged illegal political donations
- Federal prosecutors believe that Bankman Fried and his co-conspirators made over 300 donations totaling tens of millions of dollars illegally
- The crew used a “straw donor” to get around individual contribution caps
Just when Sam Bankman-Fried thought that things couldn’t get much worse, they have. The former FTX CEO has been hit with a stack of new charges relating to his well known political donations, with federal prosecutors accusing him of making them using corporate funds, which allowed him to evade limits on individual contributions to candidates. In total, a grand jury indicted Bankman-Fried on four fraud charges and eight conspiracy charges, potentially adding more years to his inevitable prison stay.
Bankman-Fried Alleged to Have Used “Straw Donor”
Bankman-Fried’s political contributions were well known, with the disgraced former CEO famously paying his way into the inner sanctum of Washington and putting himself up as a kind of crypto-regulator human bridge. However, it seems that all these efforts may not have been perfectly legal, shock horror, with the methods used to make the donations potentially breaking the law.
Details are thin on the ground, but it seems that the charges relate to a series of donations to a raft of candidates from Bankman-Fried and other co-conspirators that may have broken the law due to the fact that they were attributed to a “straw donor”. A straw donor is someone who allows someone else to donate to a political party through them, allowing the intended donor to use their legal contribution allocation.
Prison Sentence Inevitable if He’s Guilty
It’s not clear who or what Bankman-Fried and his accomplices used to make these donations on top of their own, but the charges state that some 300 donations were made in this way totaling tens of millions of dollars. Clearly this implies a large scale fraud, which is reflected in the number of charges, with a custodial sentence certain were he to be found guilty.
Last year a federal judge sentenced a former Indiana state senator and an Indianapolis casino executive to ten months two months in prison for perpetrating their own straw donor scam, as well as five-figure fines for each.
