Reports said that Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team is seeking to remove a bail condition that prevented him from accessing FTX funds, according to court filings from January 28.
It has been reported that a letter from Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, Mark Cohen, to United States District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan stated that Bankman-Fried should have access to assets held by FTX, claiming the client was not involved in previous unauthorized transactions.
However, FTX and FTX US have sought over $659 million in unauthorized transfers amid the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange in November 2022. Bankman-Fried denied any involvement in the transactions. As per the letter sent to Kaplan, Bankman-Fried was “prohibited from accessing or transferring any FTX or Alameda assets or cryptocurrency, including assets or cryptocurrency purchased with funds from FTX or Alameda”, as requested by US authorities at the first court hearing on January 3.
The report said that at the time, prosecutors acknowledged that there was no evidence that Mr. Bankman-Fried had transferred funds and noted that a federal probe was underway.
The letter noted:
“Nearly three weeks have passed since the initial pretrial conference and we assume that the Government’s investigation has confirmed what Mr. Bankman-Fried has said all along; namely, that he did not access and transfer these assets. As soon as we became aware of the transfers to provide notification.”
Thus, the letter addresses a request from January 27 by the US Department of Justice prohibiting Bankman-Fried from communicating with “current or former employees” of FTX or Alameda Research without his attorney’s presence.
Source: Cointelegraph