The Bahamas attorney-general on Sunday hit out at FTX chief executive John Ray III, accusing him of misrepresenting the actions of the islands’ regulators in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed $32bn crypto exchange
During a national address, Ryan Pinder said it was “extremely regrettable” that the new chief executive of FTX Trading “misrepresented” action taken by Bahamian regulators in the wake of FTX’s bankruptcy filing in New York earlier this month.
“It is possible that the prospect of multi-million dollar legal and consultant fees is driving both their legal strategy and the intemperate statements,” Pinder said.
Ray, an insolvency professional who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, recently said FTX’s collapse represented the worst case of corporate failure he has seen in over four decades.
He said he had found at FTX international, FTX US and Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research trading company “compromised systems integrity”, “faulty regulatory oversight abroad” and a “concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals”.
Pinder also defended The Bahamas as a jurisdiction for digital assets.“I am fully confident that, as matters progress, and the activities of the FTX group are either restructured or wound down, The Bahamas will emerge, held in even higher esteem”, he said.
Elsewhere on the islands, the assessment has been less optimistic. Stefen Deleveaux of the Caribbean Blockchain Alliance told the Financial Times a huge part of his work has been destroyed “because of Sam Bankman-Fried”.