(AFP) - The New York attorney general announced that the Bahamas authorities arrested, at the request of the US court, the former CEO of the "FTX" cryptocurrency platform, Sam Bankman-Fried, after the sudden collapse of his company.
"Earlier this evening, Samuel Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamas authorities at the request of the US Government and pursuant to a sealed indictment issued by the Southern District of New York," Attorney General Damian Williams said in a tweet.
The Attorney General stated that new details regarding this case will be announced on Tuesday.
For a month, Bankman-Fred has not stopped participating in media interviews from the Bahamas, despite the risk of being prosecuted for financial fraud after his company, whose value at the beginning of the year was $ 32 billion, went bankrupt overnight.
In early December, Bankman-Fried said he refused his lawyer's advice to remain silent now, stressing that "it is my duty to explain what happened."
For his part, Ryan Bender, the Attorney General of the Bahamas, said in a statement posted on Twitter that the United States “filed a complaint” against the 30-year-old and “will likely request that we hand him over.”
Philip Davis, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Bahamas, an archipelago located northeast of Cuba, said that both the United States and his country "have an interest in bringing to justice individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law."
In a statement, he added that his country would conduct its own "criminal investigation into the FTX collapse case."
Recently, Bankman-Fried said he was "shocked" by the many details that were revealed when the cryptocurrency platform collapsed, stressing that the problems resulted from lax oversight and controls in the company and not from any fraudulent intent.
On November 11, FTX filed for bankruptcy while facing a major cash shortage and a flood of withdrawals from panicked customers.
At the time, FTX took about $10 billion in client funds without permission, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Much of the interest focused on the relationship between FTX and its trading subsidiary, Alameda Research.
Bankman-Fried acknowledged that it was "embarrassing" that he had not paid sufficient attention to the conflicts of interest between the two companies, but insisted that he was not familiar with the details of Alameda and did not take over the company's management.
According to Coindesk, a cryptocurrency news site, Alameda's balance sheet relied heavily on a cryptocurrency created by FTX that is not tied to any asset of independent value, the FTT.
Just ten days before its bankruptcy, FTX was considered the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
According to US media, Bankman-Fred's fortune, which amounted to about $16 billion, evaporated within a few days.