Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Denies Fraud Allegations in New Interview

In a highly anticipated interview with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried admitted that he failed his job in maintaining his obligations to regulators, clients, and investors.

FTX collapsed as a result of Coindesk reporting anomalies in the firm's balance sheets. On November 11, the business applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

"Bad Month"

The former CEO told CNBC that he did not "commit fraud on anyone" and was completely shocked by what happened since he saw his crypto exchange as a "thriving business."

"I've had a bad month," Bankman-Fried said during the interview.

Sorkin questioned Bankman-Fried about the motivations behind his crypto investments given the size of Alameda's borrowing from the businesses he was looking to acquire.

Bankman-Fried believed that Alameda would have paid off all lines of credit to different borrowing offices by the middle of 2022. But according to court documents, Alameda still owes BlockFi more than $670 million.

One of the primary concerns about FTX's collapse is whether money was stolen between FTX and Alameda. For background, Alameda struggled to pay its creditors as the value of crypto began to fall.

This demonstrated Alameda's lack of assets and contributed to the crash when FTX users started the crypto exchange equivalent of a bank run by using client funds to pay off lenders, as explained by Tech Crunch.

Bankman-Fried also denied co-mingling funds between Alameda and FTX when asked by Sorkin.

The businessman said that he failed to assign someone the responsibility of overseeing the alliance between Alameda and FTX. In fact, the company has never had a board of directors even though it was estimated at $32 billion.

He said it was his responsibility to have given the financial entwining more attention, yet also he gave a justification that he was afraid of being put in danger due to his competing ownership stakes in the two firms.

"Lack of Corporate Controls"

John J. Ray III, a veteran of the Enron spin-down who took over for Bankman-Fried earlier this month, claimed in a document that he had never in his career witnessed such a complete lack of corporate controls and inexistence of reliable financial information.

The FTX collapse has become a huge headline in the tech industry that Amazon is already planning to develop a miniseries about the defunct crypto with the directors of Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War.

Anthony and Joe Russo's AGBO production company will be in charge of producing the project, and the brothers may also serve as directors for a few episodes.