Jury selection resumes at fraud trial for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried

NEW YORK (AP) — The ultimate levels of jury choice resumed Wednesday on the fraud trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in New York Metropolis.

Opening statements had been anticipated to start by the early afternoon in Manhattan federal court docket, the place Bankman-Fried has entered not responsible pleas to seven fees.

Prosecutors say the California man defrauded hundreds of buyers and prospects in his companies by siphoning off their cash for his personal makes use of.

Protection attorneys insist that their consumer had no felony intent as he turned well-known within the crypto world whereas rising FTX and a associated enterprise, Alameda Analysis, into multibillion greenback heavyweights within the cryptocurrency trade.

Attorneys and Decide Lewis A. Kaplan had been lowering a pool of 45 potential jurors to a jury of 12 with six alternates, who would sit by means of the length of a trial projected to last as long as six weeks.

Bankman-Fried, 31, turned a goal of investigators when FTX collapsed final November amid a rush of consumers looking for to get well their deposits, lower than a yr after Bankman-Fried spent thousands and thousands of {dollars} on the 2022 Tremendous Bowl with celeb commercials selling FTX because the “most secure and easiest method to purchase and promote crypto.”

Bankman-Fried was extradited to the US from the Bahamas after his arrest final December.

Initially underneath home arrest for practically eight months, his $250 million bond was revoked and he was jailed in August after a choose concluded he’d tried to affect trial witnesses.