‘I F**ked Up’: Sam Bankman-Fried Prepared Draft of His Testimony to Congress Before His Arrest in the Bahamas

Reporters have obtained a copy of the prepared statement that Sam Bankman-Fried was going to give before Congress, before the disgraced FTX co-founder was arrested in the Bahamas.

Bankman-Fried faces multiple charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and financial fraud as he was placed under arrest by the Bahamian authorities on Monday at the behest of the United States Department of Justice. The Bahamas announced that they will extradite Bankman-Fried to the U.S. where he will answer to accusations of defrauding investors with the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange.

The arrest comes as Bankman-Fried was supposed to testify to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services about FTX’s fall. Bankman-Fried has repeatedly claimed that he did not intentionally seek to defraud his clients, and prepared statements obtained by Forbes show that he was going to offer a contrite beginning to his testimony before Congress.

I would like to start by formally stating, under oath: I fucked up.

I know that it doesn’t mean much to say that I’m sorry. And so I’m dedicating as much of myself as I can to doing right by customers. When all is said and done, I’ll judge myself primarily by one metric: whether I have eventually been able to make customers whole. If I fail our customers in this regard, I have failed myself.

Bankman-Fried’s statement continues by claiming that FTX’s management data is currently being “held hostage” by bankruptcy court, so “much of my testimony is less confident and detailed than I would want it to be, and I apologize if I am unable to confidently answer completely reasonable questions.”

I deeply regret giving in to pressure to sign forms that precipitated the Chapter 11 filing just a few days after FTX International became potentially insolvent. Among other things, the Chapter 11 team was thrust into a very difficult situation, and I worry that they were given very misleading information by a few members of the FTX US team when they joined. They are trying to manage multiple complex global entities and systems without support from many of the teams who used to run them. I believe it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, for the Chapter 11 team to move forward constructively without working cooperatively with the many foreign jurisdictions that have direct regulatory and operational control over FTX International and its subsidiaries…

To the best of my knowledge, FTX US has been and remains solvent, and could pay off all of its customers in full tomorrow. Unfortunately, the Chapter 11 team has frozen the FTX US exchange, blocking customers’ access to their account information and funds. The customers who have lost assets are those who traded on the FTX International platforms, which do not accept US residents.

My primary focus right now is to do right by the customers of FTX International who were hurt. I am fighting to make these customers as whole as I can, and I will keep doing so as long as I see any pathway forward, because that is my duty.

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