Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund Alameda Research diverted between $100m and $150m in bribes to Chinese officials to gain access to locked trading accounts, his former partner and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison has told a New York Court.
Testifying at Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial on Wednesday, Ellison said that the bribes were paid in late 2021 after a previous attempt to access the funds using accounts in the names of several Thai sex workers had failed.
The payments were talked about by Ellison during a wider discussion about how Bankman-Fried discouraged employees from putting things in writing, and how Ellison and Bankman-Fried “often spoke in coded terms,” about Alameda activity.
The two accounts in question, which each held around $1bn in assets, were frozen in early 2021 by Chinese regulators as part of a money laundering investigation into an individual who had traded with Alameda.
Bankman-Fried has not been charged over the alleged payments, and US District Judge Lewis Kaplan instructed the jury to only consider Ellison’s testimony about them to illustrate the level of trust between the pair, and his potential motive.
