Nishad Singh former FTX employee Pleads Guilty to 6 Criminal Charges
2023.02.28 14:23
Nishad Singh former FTX employee Pleads Guilty to 6 Criminal Charges
By Tiffany Smith
Budrigannews.com – At a court hearing on Tuesday, Nishad Singh, the former director of engineering at the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, pleaded guilty to six U.S. criminal charges. This comes as U.S. prosecutors intensify their investigation into members of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle.
One count of wire fraud, three counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, one count of money laundering conspiracy, and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States by breaking campaign finance laws were all admitted by Singh. The plea was accepted by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan.
The founder of FTX, Bankman-Fried, was indicted on eight counts of fraud and conspiracy. According to the prosecution, he lied to investors and lenders about the state of his businesses’ finances and stole billions of dollars from FTX customer deposits to make up for losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research.
He has said that he is innocent. People with knowledge of wrongdoing at FTX have been urged to come forward by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on multiple occasions.
Bankman-Fried, 30, capitalized on a surge in the value of bitcoin and other digital assets to amass an estimated $26 billion in wealth and establish himself as a powerful political donor in the United States.
OpenSecrets reports that Singh contributed $8 million to Democratic candidates’ campaigns during the 2022 election cycle.
Prosecutors said last week in new charges against Bankman-Fried that he and two other former FTX executives conspired to donate tens of millions of dollars to get lawmakers to pass legislation that would benefit the company.
According to prosecutors, the “straw” donors or corporate funds used to make the donations made them illegal. According to them, another FTX executive named CC-1 was instructed by Bankman-Fried to give more than $21 million to a group that supports LGBT people.
According to the records kept by the Federal Election Commission, on July 7, 2022, Singh made a donation of $1.1 million to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a national organization that works to elect people who are openly LGBTQ.
In December, two of Bankman-Fried’s closest associates agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, which led to Singh’s plea agreement.
Alameda’s chief executive Caroline Ellison and FTX’s chief technology officer Gary Wang both pleaded guilty to seven and four criminal charges, respectively.
In a later blog post, Bankman-Fried wrote that Singh was a close friend of the younger Bankman-Fried’s brother. According to CNBC, Singh became the director of engineering at FTX in 2019 after working at Alameda.
Reuters reported in December that Singh altered the software of FTX in 2020 to prevent Alameda from having its assets automatically sold if it was losing too much borrowed money.
Alameda was able to keep borrowing money from FTX thanks to the exemption, regardless of how much collateral it used to secure its loans.
In a comment that was seen by Reuters in the platform’s code, Singh wrote, “Be extra careful not to liquidate.”
According to civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Bankman-Fried, the code change provided Alameda with a “virtually unlimited line of credit” at FTX.
It also stated that customers of FTX contributed the billions of dollars that FTX secretly loaned to Alameda over the next two years.
