It’s week 4 of Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, and on Thursday the former FTX CEO took the stand to testify on his personal behalf. Bankman-Fried is being charged with seven counts of fraud and cash laundering at the Southern District of New York courthouse.
During court docket, Bankman-Fried wore an outsized grey go well with and a purple tie. He arrived at the courthouse round 9:30 a.m., together with his palms folded in entrance of him, nodding at these he made eye contact with. Throughout the morning, Bankman-Fried appeared relaxed, turning round to face the again of the court docket and sometimes smiling at his attorneys.
This marks the second time Bankman-Fried has spoken out publicly in the courtroom after saying sure on the first day in response to Judge Lewis Kaplan asking if he understood he had the proper to testify if he needed to.
His first phrases spoken on the stand Thursday had been: “Good afternoon.”
But not like the remainder of the trial, Kaplan despatched the jury residence. He first needed to evaluate Bankman-Fried’s feedback earlier than figuring out whether or not that testimony could possibly be shared with jurors. “I haven’t had a hearing of this nature in a long time, if ever,” Kaplan mentioned.
Once on the stand, Bankman-Fried was jittery and fast to answer the questions his protection lawyer, Mark Cohen, was asking. But when it got here time for Danielle Sassoon, assistant U.S. lawyer for the SDNY, to cross-examine, he was slower to reply and mentioned he couldn’t bear in mind lots of the information.
One of the areas Kaplan needed to listen to about was Bankman-Fried counting on authorized counsel to draft phrases of service and information retention insurance policies, which included utilizing Signal to share inside communication.
Bankman-Fried mentioned the “big picture takeaway” for these insurance policies was that particular information like KYC (know your shopper) insurance policies, regulatory mandates, compliance and formal accounting required retention. But not components like drafted defective stability sheets, which Caroline Ellison testified about weeks earlier.