The pinnacle of the U.S. Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee (CFTC), Rostin Behnam, had numerous contact with Sam Bankman-Good friend, the disgraced former CEO of FTX, however lawmakers recommend he hasn’t been absolutely forthcoming about these interactions. So, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are demanding extra.
Warren and Grassley despatched Behnam a letter calling for “an accounting of all conferences and correspondence between you and Sam Bankman-Fried throughout your tenure.” Over a 14-month interval, CFTC officers had met with Bankman-Fried and his crew as many as 10 occasions on the company, and Behnam advised lawmakers in 2022 that he’d additionally exchanged “quite a lot of messages” with the FTX founder, who was not too long ago sentenced to 25 years in jail for the large fraud perpetrated there.
For his half, Behnam and his company have no less than one important motive for speaking so usually with the FTX CEO: He was attempting to push part of his firm – the LedgerX division that was spun off once more after the collapse to return to its unique title – into a novel place to immediately deal with margined derivatives buying and selling for patrons with out a go-between agency. The failed effort had even been the subject of an in-house roundtable dialogue on the CFTC by which SBF starred on a giant panel in any other case crammed with business opponents.
In a Senate listening to in 2022 simply after the meltdown of FTX, Grassley and one other senator requested Behnam for info on his and his employees’s conferences and textual content conversations with Bankman-Fried. Afterwards, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) requested for information of correspondence between FTX, the CFTC, different authorities companies and the White Home.
The brand new letter from Warren and Grassley, dated April 12, once more asks for such correspondence, detailing that they need copies of all written communications, plus minutes and timelines of interactions.
Spokespeople for the CFTC did not instantly reply to a request for remark.
The chief of the opposite U.S. markets regulator, Securities and Trade Fee Chair Gary Gensler, has equally drawn scrutiny for his company’s interactions with SBF within the months earlier than the corporate’s dramatic collapse.
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