Sam Bankman-Fried, 31, was considered the king of cryptocurrencies. The founder and former chief executive of FTX, under investigation for fraud and now on parole after posting $250 million bail, had planned to buy Nauru, the world’s third-smallest country. Apparently, Bankman-Fried was convinced that the planet Earth would collapse, and he wanted a safe haven. This information is found in a lawsuit that FTX filed last Thursday against its founder and three other former executives.
The plan was to buy this state of Micronesia through the company’s non-profit foundation to turn it into a bunker to ward off a cataclysm. As the document noted, he wanted to “purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru to build a ‘bunker’ to be used for ‘some event where between 50 and 99.99 percent of the people die to ensure that the majority of the EAs (effective altruists) survive'”.
The memo also mentions efforts to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement and build a laboratory” on Nauru, noting that perhaps “there are also other things that are useful to do with a sovereign country.”
With a population of 12,000 and an area of ??21 square km, Nauru is the third smallest country in the world, behind Vatican City and Monaco. In the 1990s it became a headquarters used by people with large capitals for money laundering. In 1998, 70,000 million dollars were transferred illegally from Russian banks to accounts that were established on the island with the aim of evading taxes. In 2022 the US Treasury designated Nauru as a money-laundering country, and in 2006 the island’s bank closed.
Last Thursday’s lawsuit came as the successor to Bankman-Fried seeks to “recover damages caused by the defendants’ breach of fiduciary duties,” the document said. The company wants to “prevent and recover illegal transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars that the defendants misappropriated from debtors’ assets and debtors-in-possession,” the text says.
In the memorandum they claim the founder and his team $1 billion that they appropriated before the bankruptcy last November. Of this sum of money, the cryptocurrency magnate would have transferred 10 million dollars to his father when the company was already insolvent. A “gift” that is serving to pay for his defense expenses. Sam Bankman-Fried is currently out on bail and lives with his parents.
The cryptocurrency magnate was arrested in the Bahamas after being indicted on eight counts, including fraud, for diverting investor funds to his investment arm Alameda Research. Once extradited in the United States, he pleaded not guilty.
Thursday’s memo called the entire trial “one of the largest financial frauds in history,” and prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to limit Bankman-Fried’s ability to discuss details of the case outside of the court. And it is that according to a judicial file, the magnate would have tried to influence the jury after sharing private writings from his former partner and former CEO of Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison, with a journalist from the New York Times. Said head published an article that included personal opinions that she wrote in private Google documents.
This situation prompted the prosecutors to be forceful, writing: “By selectively sharing certain private documents with the New York Times, the defendant is attempting to discredit a witness, cast Ellison in a bad light, and advance his defense through the press. and outside the limitations of the courtroom and the rules of evidence: that Ellison was a jilted lover who perpetrated these crimes alone.”
