Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial will resume for its fifth day on Oct. 10, with prosecutors expected to question his ex and former colleague, Caroline Ellison.
The trial, which is set to last six weeks, will continue on Tuesday with key testimony expected from Ellison, who is regarded as a star witness to the goings-on at Alameda Research, where she held the title of CEO.
Alameda, a sister firm to FTX, allegedly siphoned off $8 billion in customer money from FTX and used that cash for personal means.
Ellison, along with former FTX CTO Gary Wang, pleaded guilty in December. Since then, they have been working with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Observers of the trial should expect Ellison to discuss the sequence of events from 2019 to 2022, where FTX allegedly allowed Alameda to receive billion-dollar loans without posting collateral.
The agreement permitted Alameda to borrow unlimited amounts and be free of negative balances and margin calls on FTX’s liquidation protocols.
Ellison has previously confessed that she and Bankman-Fried altered financial statements to hide borrowing activity between Alameda and FTX executives.
Bankman-Fried, 31, faces seven federal charges, including fraud and money laundering. He pleaded not guilty in January.
Ellison’s testimony follows Wang’s, which took place on Friday — the fourth day of the trial. Here are the latest live updates by @innercitypress, from inside the courtroom on day 4:
Wang’s testimony
- Alameda had to “Allow Negative” privileges on FTX’s platform.
- This allowed Alameda to trade more funds than it had on its account.
- Alameda has a large line of credit, and it could trade faster than other accounts.
- Alameda could withdraw more fiat and crypto than it had on its account; it withdrew $8 billion.
- Wang said these funds came from FTX’s customer deposits.
- Bankman-Fried, or SBF, asked Nishad and Wang to create this ‘backdoor code’ in July 2019 — two months after FTX was founded.
- Alameda had another account with FTX under a different name – Cottonwood Trading.
- In 2020, Alameda’s negative balance was more than FTX’s revenue.
- Alameda’s total line of credit was $65 billion.
- No other customer had credit with FTX upwards of $1 billion.
- SBF told Alameda to pay off Genesis’s loans using FTX’s customer funds.
