Bad financial controls is if someone else whoopsie accidentally steals or mishandles the funds. Which at least per a cite provided earlier, he admitted to doing it himself.
To be able to claim a lack of culpability for this requires a degree of plausible ignorance about what the left and right hands were doing. He seems to be working hard to chip away at any sort of plausibility there.
>(1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money;
>(2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Thus far he hasn't admitted to either and so hasn't yet admitted to a crime.
Wire fraud != fraud, theft, or embezzlement.
It’s a specific sub-type of fraud, and your link is pointing to a specific list of elements within a certain jurisdiction.
Even then, that vox conversation cited above combined with what we already know is likely to be enough to prove at least embezzlement.
Here is a link to some elements of the crime for that if you’re interested.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/embezzlement
Based on what we’ve seen so far, unless he somehow can convince a Judge or Jury that he didn’t know what was happening, it would be very implausible someone couldn’t get a sizable conviction somewhere on one or more of those charges. But we won’t know for sure until the situation has been analyzed. But he sure isn’t helping himself.
Which is why I said what I said. He could of course have no defense and sit there mute for the entire trial, but I can’t imagine a Jury would be all that convinced by it, if the prosecution provided even the most basic set of evidence that seems to be lying around all over the place.
Yes. The investigation has to happen before the arrest. With violent crime, it's usually clear what happened; the question is who did it. With white-collar crime, sorting out what happened is complicated. With FTX, it's really complicated. Prosecutors only get one chance; if they take someone to trial on early evidence and lose, they usually can't come back later and try again.
But it doesn't all have to be figured out. Just enough for a long sentence. Known overt acts, such as buying US$300 million of Bahamas real estate with company funds and putting the real estate in a family name, are probably enough for grand theft.
Untangling how to charge him, and where, and digging up concrete enough evidence to file an indictment is going to take awhile of course. The post-bankruptcy CEO seems to be finding plenty.
As with a lot of non-violent crime, it takes awhile to arrest someone because there is a lot of paperwork. When the suspect has a lot of cash and lawyers, it takes longer because they need to make sure there isn't an angle they are missing that could get them off.