By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sam Bankman-Fried is due back in court on Wednesday, as the judge overseeing his fraud case weighs whether the founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange can remain free on his current bail conditions ahead of his Oct. 2 trial.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to bar Bankman-Fried from making public statements that could interfere with the case.
In what prosecutors last week said amounted to witness tampering, Bankman-Fried gave a New York Times reporter personal writings by Caroline Ellison, the former chief executive of his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.
Ellison, also Bankman-Fried’s onetime romantic partner, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against him.
Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty to charges he stole billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at Alameda, consented to the gag order but asked that it also apply to prosecutors and potential witnesses, namely current FTC Chief Executive Officer John Ray.
Kaplan scheduled the 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) hearing in Manhattan federal court in part to consider “the adequacy and continuation of the current bail conditions.”
It is not the first time the judge has questioned whether Bankman-Fried’s bail terms are too loose. The 31-year-old former billionaire has been largely confined to his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, since his extradition in December from the Bahamas, where he was arrested and where FTX was based.
In January, prosecutors proposed restricting Bankman-Fried’s internet use after he attempted to contact Ray and an FTX lawyer. In a February hearing, Kaplan questioned why he was “being asked to turn (Bankman-Fried) loose,” but stopped short of jailing him and imposed limits on his communications.
The Times last Thursday published a story citing excerpts of Ellison’s personal Google documents from before FTX’s collapse in which she described being “unhappy and overwhelmed” with her job and feeling “hurt/rejected” from her breakup with Bankman-Fried.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
