Major media outlets demand identities of SBF’s $250M bond guarantors

Eight main media corporations together with Bloomberg, The Monetary Occasions and Reuters have demanded public disclosure of the 2 people accountable for guaranteeing FTX former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bond. 

In a Jan. 12 letter addressed to New York District Court docket Decide Lewis Kaplan, attorneys from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP — performing on behalf of the media giants — argued that “the general public’s proper to know Bankman-Fried’s guarantors outweighed their privateness and security rights.”

Media organizations seeking to persuade the decide to unseal the identities of Bankman-Fried’s guarantors embrace the Related Press, Bloomberg, CNBC, Dow Jones, The Monetary Occasions, Insider and the Washington Put up.

In making their case, the media’s attorneys used case precedent from Ghislaine Maxwell’s Dec. 2020 case — the place the bond guarantors’ names weren’t revealed — to argue that Sam Bankman-Fried’s monetary crimes weren’t as critical as Maxwell’s involvement in Jeffery Epstein’s youngster intercourse visitors ring scandal:

“Whereas Mr. Bankman-Fried is accused of great monetary crimes, a public affiliation with him doesn’t carry practically the identical stigma as with the Jeffrey Epstein youngster intercourse trafficking scandal.”

In line with a Jan. 12 report from Reuters, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys beforehand argued that Bankman-Fried’s sureties must be saved beneath wraps as Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried — the mother and father and co-signers of Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bond — have obtained ongoing bodily threats since FTX’s catastrophic collapse in early November.

Associated: Sam Bankman-Fried: ‘I didn’t steal funds, and I actually didn’t stash billions away’

If the guarantor’s names had been revealed, there could be a “critical trigger for concern” for the security and welfare of these two individuals, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys argued.

On Jan. 3, Bankman-Fried pleaded not responsible towards all eight legal fees associated to the shock collapse of his former cryptocurrency alternate FTX, which incorporates wire fraud and violations of marketing campaign finance legal guidelines amongst different fees.