According to a report from Bloomberg, Joseph Bankman, Sam Bankman-Fried’s father, also attended meetings focused on developing marketing materials for the FTT token.
This was the native exchange of the FTX crypto exchange, which had played a key role in the collapse of the company last November.
The report
A professor at Stanford Law School, Joseph Bankman also attended meetings related to tax issues, referring to invoices from Fenwick & West.
Alameda Research, the sister trading company of FTX, had hired the law firm in question. This can prove to be an interesting twist in the case.
This is due to the fact that Bankman-Fried’s counsel indicated last month that they might opt to use the ‘advice-of-counsel’ defense in their client’s criminal trial.
This defense highlights a lack of criminal intent because of the assurances provided by lawyers. A court filing outlining the strategy did not have any mention of Bankman.
However, his father reportedly gave him considerable advice, given that he is a legal scholar, who has an in-depth understanding of tax law.
According to the report, even before Bankman-Fried launched FTX and had been leading Alameda, his father had assisted him in legal matters.
The details
Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder of the FTX exchange, and other insiders have been accused of misappropriating customer funds worth billions of dollars.
In fact, the FTX fiasco is now being defined as one of the biggest frauds to have taken place in American history.
A litany of charges have been filed against the disgraced crypto mogul, which includes money laundering and fraud, but he has pleaded not guilty to these charges.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Joseph Bankman had played a key role in FTX’s decision to shift its headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas.
His father
In July, the current management of FTX filed a lawsuit in which it said that the funds that Bankman-Fried had allegedly misappropriated included a gift of $10 million to his father.
The lawsuit has accused his father of using the money to bankroll the legal defense of his son. While he did not have a formal role at FTX, he appeared in an FTX commercial as a U.S. founding father.
The commercial ran last year during the Super Bowl. Bankman had rebutted the critique of the US Constitution by comedian Larry David in the said ad.
Before FTX collapsed, the FTT token was reportedly supporting the operations of Alameda Research. The token crashed after Binance’s decision to liquidate its holdings.
The tailspin of the exchange’s token turned fatal after Binance backed away from a possible acquisition of the FTX crypto exchange.
Customers had rushed to withdraw their funds from the crypto exchange due to these uncertainties and FTX had been unable to meet their demands.
It was forced to admit that it did not have one-to-one assets of customer reserves and ended up filing for bankruptcy last year in November.