(RoyalPatriot.com )- Disgraced former cryptocurrency darling Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t just facing financial ruin, he’s also facing investigations from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Until last week, Bankman-Fried was running a very successful cryptocurrency exchange network called FTX. The company crashed in a matter of hours, however, after it was found that he moved almost $10 billion of his clients’ assets from the exchange to Alameda Research, a trading firm that he’s also associated with.
This caused a major crisis with liquidity, and ultimately forced the company to file for bankruptcy protection.
There are some pretty big concerns with not only how Bankman-Fried did business, but also political donations he made. It is being reported that, as a major donor to the Democratic Party, he funded campaigns for Congress members who are tasked with overseeing the CFTC.
The CFTC, along with the SEC, are both charged with making determinations as to whether an asset is a security or not. If it is, it will be subject to a lot of regulation, just like assets on the traditional stock market. If it’s not — as Bankman-Fried and many other cryptocurrency owners hope for — then it doesn’t face stringent regulations.
The CFTC is an agency that is overseen by the Agriculture Committees in both the House and Senate, which approved commissioners that the president nominates to serve on the board.
It’s been revealed that Bankman-Fried has made large donations in the past to Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, who serves as the chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee in the upper chamber. He gave more than $20,000 to the Stabenow Victory Fund as well as $5,800 directly to her campaign.
The former CEO of FTX also donated about $6,000 to Arkansas Senator John Boozman, the ranking Republican member of the committee. He gave another $5,800 to North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who is the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Commodities, Risk Management and Trade.
Campaign finance records show that a PAC founded by Ryan Salame, another executive at FTX, donated in excess of $1 million in the 2022 midterm election cycle for Boozman’s campaign. It also spent more than $1 million on the campaign of Minnesota Representative Brad Finstad, a Republican member of the House Agriculture Committee.
The list of shady political donations goes on and on for Bankman-Fried, who is facing a lot of scrutiny for his actions in running FTX into the ground.
In addition to the campaign contributions he made, he also lobbied to the Senate Agriculture Committee for legislation that would ultimately give the CFTC more oversight authority in regard to regulating the cryptocurrency industry, as crypto publication Coindesk reported recently.
He also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby Congress members, the CFTC and the SEC on that legilstion.
The bill in question, called the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, would give CFTC “jurisdiction to oversee the spot digital commodity market.” Booker, Boozman and Stabenow were three of the Congress members who introduced the legislation.
