Barnini Chakraborty is the senior investigations reporter at the Washington Examiner. She has previously worked at Fox News as a senior features and politics reporter. She's also worked at Fox Business as a field producer and at Dow Jones. She began her career at the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia.
Nishad Singh, a former executive at cryptocurrency exchange FTX, testified on Monday that his friend and former boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, knowingly siphoned billions of dollars in customer funds to go on spending sprees, which included pricey real estate purchases and endorsement deals with celebrities like Super Bowl champion Tom Brady.
Singh, who was classmates and close friends with Bankman-Fried's younger brother Gabriel, told jurors he had had "a lot of admiration and respect" for Bankman-Fried but it"eroded" over time. He added that he, Bankman-Fried, and other FTX and Alameda Research executives including Gary Wang, Ryan Salame, and Caroline Ellison had knowingly defrauded customers and investors.
Singh, the former head of engineering at FTX, is the latest person in Bankman-Fried's tight-knit circle of friends to testify against him. Prosecutors allege that Bankman-Fried told Singh and FTX co-founder Wang to create the computer code that would allow Alameda, the crypto hedge fund Bankman-Fried owned, to borrow vast sums of money from FTX customers.“Sam is a formidable character, brilliant,” Singh said from the witness stand. “So I had a lot of admiration and respect for him.
Bankman-Fried is accused of illegally diverting billions of dollars from client accounts for his personal use, which also included making risky trades at Alameda. He allegedly spent millions on illegal donations to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and their affiliated political action committees as part of a plan to buy power and influence crypto regulation.Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to two counts of fraud and five conspiracy counts tied to FTX's 2022 implosion.
Singh, who lived in a penthouse in the Bahamas with Bankman-Fried, also testified that Bankman-Fried got angry with him after he cast doubt on FTX and tried to reign in the one-time billionaire's spending habits. Bankman-Fried claimed the issue with FTX wasn't his spending but that the"real insidious problem" was Singh.