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US prosecutors have accused FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried of witness tampering and requested a federal decide to concern an order that may bar the previous billionaire and different events from making public statements more likely to intervene with a good trial.
The prosecutors wrote to US District Decide Lewis Kaplan on Thursday referencing a New York Instances article titled “Contained in the Non-public Writings of Caroline Ellison, Star Witness within the FTX Case”.
The article reported excerpts from Ellison’s private Google paperwork from earlier than the collapse of FTX wherein she spoke about being “fairly sad and overwhelmed” along with her job and feeling “harm/rejected” from her breakup with Bankman-Fried.
Ellison led Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research hedge fund and has pleaded responsible to defrauding buyers and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. In December, Bankman-Fried mentioned he and Ellison had been in a relationship however gave no additional particulars.
Prosecutors mentioned it was obvious Bankman-Fried shared paperwork with the New York Instances and that his attorneys have since confirmed to the federal government that he met with one of many article’s authors in individual and shared paperwork “that weren’t a part of the federal government’s discovery materials.”
Bankman-Fried’s spokesperson and attorneys didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. The New York Instances declined to remark, and Ellison’s attorneys didn’t reply to a Reuters request for remark.
The prosecutors argued that by sharing these paperwork, Bankman-Fried was attempting to malign Ellison’s credibility, and that such conduct might chill witnesses from testifying and taint the jury pool.
“By selectively sharing sure non-public paperwork with the New York Instances, the defendant is trying to discredit a witness, solid Ellison in a poor mild, and advance his protection via the press and out of doors the constraints of the courtroom and guidelines of proof: that Ellison was a jilted lover who perpetrated these crimes alone”, prosecutors wrote within the letter.
Earlier on Thursday, FTX Buying and selling sued founder Bankman-Fried and different former executives of the cryptocurrency alternate, searching for to recoup greater than $1 billion (practically Rs. 88,200 crore) they allegedly misappropriated earlier than FTX went bankrupt.
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