Confirmed by Sarah Emerson, a tech reporter at Forbes: https://twitter.com/SarahNEmerson/status/1602448748109512704 (Edit: Now also confirmed by NYT, CNBC, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and others.)
Includes statement from the Attorney General of The Bahamas, transcribed below:
Statement from the Attorney General of The Bahamas Sen. Ryan Pinder KC on the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried
On 12 December 2022, the Office of the Attorney General of The Bahamas is announcing the arrest by The Royal Bahamas Police Force of Sam Bankman-Fried ("SBF"), former CEO of FTX. SBF's arrest followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition.
As a result of the notification received and the material provided therewith, it was deemed appropriate for the Attorney General to seek SBF's arrest and hold him in custody pursuant to our nation's Extradition Act.
At such time as a formal request for extradition is made, The Bahamas intends to process it promptly, pursuant to Bahamian law and its treaty obligations with the United States.
Responding to SBF's arrest, Prime Minister Davis stated, "The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law. While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere."
December 12, 2022
Office of The Attorney General &
Ministry of Legal Affairs
Commonwealth of The Bahamas
Full text of statement SBF planned to give to US House hearing (which the representative who submitted it for the record found completely disrespectful in tone):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2022/12/13/exclusive-transcript-the-full-testimony-sbf-planned-to-give-to-congress/
Thanks for sharing. He does not know how to stop digging his hole even deeper. I do not recall off the top of my head ever reading such a whiny, self-indulgent statement by a criminal defendant or defendant-to-be.
I find it disappointing that he tries to use EA as a shield (p 17, "As a believer in the Effective Altruism movement, my primary goal has never been personal enrichment; I'm motivated by a commitment to help bring happiness and alleviate suffering for others.") This is in the context of denying that he has billions of dollars stashed away. If he really cared about bringing happiness and alleviating suffering, why would he further tarnish the EA community's reputation by associating himself with it in testimony before Congress?
He probably cares about those things less than he cares about minimizing the number of decades he spends in a modern dungeon known as a United States Penitentiary. And he thinks that painting himself as having had good motives at heart will curry favor with the sentencing judge he is likely to face.
(By the way, I think his strategy will backfire -- it might have been a reasonable mitigation strategy if he had chosen to come clean almost immediately after the collapse. But -- assuming he is convicted -- when combined with his denials of misconduct, it will come across as fake piety that will not play well in front of most judges.)
Yep. The only bit I'm qualified to assess is that he uses the phrase 'chalk full' instead of 'chock fill'. He should have read more books.
That updates the probability that no lawyer reviewed this before he sent it to whoever he sent it to (someone in/at Congress?). I would hope that most of us would have caught that typo in a document of this nature . . .