U.S. Republican Senator writes to Federal authorities on FTX’s collapse
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, requested documents and correspondence regarding the failure of cryptocurrency platform FTX in a letter to senior Biden federal authorities.
The Senator looks for answers
Senator Hawley has written a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler, and Head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Rostin Behnam. In the letter, he questioned the executives about their inquiries into FTX or Alameda Research, its sister company, and any agreements their organizations had made with the two businesses.
The Missouri Republican also inquired whether FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried had been used as a conduit by the Justice Department, SEC, or CFTC to connect with the Democratic Party infrastructure. In the middle of the campaign season, Bankman-Fried has been a generous supporter of Democratic candidates, donating about $40 million to their coffers in 2021 and 2022. Additionally, he gave President Biden’s campaign roughly $10 million.
In the letter to the government, he said that Mr. Bankman-Fried had used the triumph of his criminal organization to become one of the richest men in America momentarily and to support the Democratic Party. ” It has developed into its second-largest single donor behind George Soros in recent years,” he said in his conclusion.
The Senator is convinced that SBF is deep into the Democratic Party
Before the midterm elections, Sam Bankman-Fried, the creator of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, donated millions of dollars to Democratic parties and politicians.
Senator Hawley stated that it is quite evident that Mr. Bankman-Fried used widespread fraud to pay for his extravagant contributions to the Democratic Party. He stated, “In the end, billions of dollars were stolen from investors and given to Democrats and left-wing organizations.”
According to him, it was strange that FTX collapsed soon after the midterm elections, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest for federal authorities and law enforcement on the spot, looking into, and foiling the fraudulent plan.
How it all went down.
After clients left the exchange due to a liquidity crunch last week, FTX filed for bankruptcy protection. FTX’s main rival, Binance, withdrew from a merger agreement after reviewing the exchange’s financial documents.
Bankman-Fried left his position as CEO of FTX after the company’s bankruptcy, and his net worth fell from around $16 billion to nothing. Bankman-Fried tweeted an apology to FTX users, calling his actions ‘screwed up.’
Senator Josh Hawley’s Friday message was sent to several people, including Attorney General Merrick Garland. In a bankruptcy filing, John Ray III—the new CEO of FTX—wrote that he had never witnessed “such severe a collapse of corporate controls and so complete an unavailability of trustworthy financial information as here.”
SBF went against the terms of service
In a letter to Garland, Gensler, and Behnam, Hawley claimed that Mr. Bankman-Fried had violated the terms of service of the exchange by withdrawing customer deposits from FTX to cover losses at Alameda. He writes: “Mr. Bankman-Fried loaded FTX’s asset ledger with near-zero value synthetic assets and grossly distorted the value of those assets to conceal the fact that he had exhausted FTX’s assets.”
He continued:
“The public discovery of this conduct resulted in a collapse in the value of exchange-related assets, a liquidity crunch as customers hurried to withdraw their deposits, and ultimately resulted in both FTX and Alameda declaring for insolvency.”
Customers are now holding the bag in their hands, the senator said as his conclusion.
