Sam Bankman-Fried faced an onslaught of question on Monday about his past public statements and whether he told the truth about the relationship between his private trading firm Alameda Research and the FTX exchange, as New York prosecutors cross-examined the former cryptocurrency mogul on trial for fraud.
Prosecutors showed the jury notes written by Bankman-Fried after his businesses filed for bankruptcy in November 2022 in which he said his crypto empire would not have collapsed if Alameda had truly been “100 per cent separate” and “completely unrelated . . . in every way”.
The 31-year-old, who had earlier answered questions from his own lawyers, was confronted by prosecutors throughout the day with emails, congressional testimony and statements to the press in which he had repeatedly presented Alameda in public as independent from FTX. “Its account is like everyone else’s,” he wrote in a 2022 email shown in court.