A federal judge has denied FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s pretrial motions to dismiss criminal charges against him. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote that Bankman-Fried did not have standing to dismiss many of the charges and didn’t meet the extraordinary circumstances for a dismissal. Bankman-Fried had filed seven pretrial motions to dismiss the bulk of the charges, which included wire fraud, bank fraud, operating an unlicensed money transmitter, bribery, and campaign finance charges.
In a 41-page memorandum, Judge Kaplan detailed his reasoning for rejecting the four remaining pretrial motions to dismiss, addressing questions of venue and whether prosecutors had alleged valid property right claims in bringing fraud charges. He noted that the Second Circuit has deemed dismissal an extreme sanction that has been upheld only in very limited and extreme circumstances, and should be reserved for the truly extreme cases, especially where serious criminal conduct is involved.
The judge had previously allowed Bankman-Fried and prosecutors to sever five of the 13 charges brought against the onetime FTX CEO, setting a March 2024 trial date for those charges. Bankman-Fried had argued that the Bahamas had to consent to charges brought post-extradition, an argument a Bahamas court agreed to prior to this month’s hearing. However, prosecutors are now set for an Oct. 2, 2023 trial date on the first eight charges they brought against Bankman-Fried.