Govt Exhibit 1802
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Caroline Ellison, the government’s star witness in its felony scenario from the disgraced former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is envisioned to take the stand on Tuesday, as the legal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried resumes in a downtown Manhattan courthouse.
Ellison, who ran FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Investigation, pleaded guilty in December to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to dedicate wire fraud, conspiracy to dedicate commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to dedicate income laundering.
Element of Ellison’s plea offer with the governing administration has associated cooperating with the prosecution’s case from Bankman-Fried, similar to the arrangement struck with Gary Wang — the lesser-acknowledged co-founder of FTX and Alameda, whose cross-evaluation picks up at 9:30 a.m.
Ellison features a distinctive view of the defendant, owning been a person of the company’s earliest recruits in 2017. Bankman-Fried had reportedly certain the Stanford grad to ditch her Wall Street trading career at Jane Money to be a part of Alameda as a trader, back again when the hedge fund was however in its original office in the San Francisco Bay location. Ellison also expended a long time as Bankman-Fried’s on-all over again, off-again girlfriend and, at periods, his roommate.
U.S. Lawyer Thane Rehn teed up Ellison’s potential testimony in his opening assertion to the jury final 7 days, declaring that Bankman-Fried “was utilizing her as a front” when “in truth, he was still calling the shots at Alameda.”
Rehn went on to allege in his opening that it was Bankman-Fried who experienced concocted a “scheme to take revenue from FTX and give it to Alameda” and that Ellison would share the aspects of how she and her former lover stole customer revenue from FTX and deployed that dollars via Alameda.
In the meantime, Bankman-Fried’s direct protection attorney Mark Cohen spun a far distinctive narrative in his opening remarks in court docket, casting Ellison as a chief who held company management around the business and whose leadership in the long run ran the company into the ground.
In Cohen’s recounting of situations, Bankman-Fried experienced urged his previous deputy at Alameda to “put on a hedge,” but “she failed to do so at the time.”
Significantly absent hence far in proceedings is the point out of Ellison’s co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who was a classmate of Bankman-Fried at MIT. Trabucco still left Alameda in Aug. 2022 and has stayed relatively underneath the radar.
Attorneys for the U.S. Attorney’s business office entered into evidence pics showcasing Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers at their shared $35 million Bahamian penthouse.
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For months, the 28-year-previous has been the subject of mass speculation, as her private writings and general public posts have been scrutinized by the push — and by criminal attorneys.
Ellison has tweeted about “regular amphetamine use,” reportedly journaled on Tumblr about her very own exploration into polyamory, and in Michael Lewis’s new e-book about the increase and drop of Bankman-Fried, considerable business enterprise-like memos written by Ellison to Bankman-Fried get rid of new gentle on their beleaguered romance.
“Caroline sensed that, even as Sam promoted her to CEO of Alameda Investigation, he disapproved of her occupation overall performance — and she shared his feeling,” Lewis wrote in his book.
Lewis went on to share an excerpt from one particular of the memos that Ellison had despatched to her manager and boyfriend: “It feels like I’m performing a significantly worse work taking care of Alameda than you would if you were being operating on it entire-time,” she wrote. “I’m going to fuck up vital factors if you will not phase in in some cases,” ongoing the excerpt from Ellison’s memo shared in Lewis’s e book.
The former Alameda exec had followed Bankman-Fried from California, to Hong Kong, and finally, to the Bahamas, as Bankman-Fried repeatedly shifted headquarters for his crypto companies. Lewis’s reporting incorporates speculation that Bankman-Fried’s departures from each town coincided with relationship problems with Ellison.
In July, the New York Instances released a report with non-public diary entries of Ellison leaked to the publication by Bankman-Fried, an act which in the long run landed him back in jail right after Judge Lewis Kaplan revoked his bail for alleged witness tampering.
In a Google doc from Feb. 2022 shared with the Times, Ellison wrote, “I have been emotion really sad and overcome with my career…At the stop of the day I can not hold out to go property and switch off my cellular phone and have a consume and get away from it all.”
She included, “It will not actually feel like you can find an conclusion in sight.”
Ellison’s insecurities both with regards to her partnership with Bankman-Fried and in her job as the major chief at Alameda are chronicled thoroughly in Lewis’s reporting and in the leaked diary entries.
Court filings show that Ellison’s compensation paled by comparison with other executives in Bankman-Fried’s crypto empires. Of the $3.2 billion that went to the exchange’s founders and other top employees, $6 million went to Ellison, compared to $587 million to FTX’s head of engineering Nishad Singh, $246 million to Wang and $2.2 billion to Bankman-Fried.
