Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested in the Bahamas

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried won’t tes­ti­fy before Con­gress after all. The Bahamas Attor­ney Gen­er­al announced Mon­day that Bankman-Fried has been arrest­ed and will like­ly be extra­dit­ed to the Unit­ed States soon for trial.

The Jus­tice Depart­ment said it had arrest­ed SBF after it “received for­mal notice from the Unit­ed States that the Unit­ed States is like­ly to file crim­i­nal charges against SBF and seek extradition.”

Last Fri­day, the Jus­tice Depart­ment said it was inves­ti­gat­ing “close­ly” his role in the recent col­lapse of a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange, expect­ed to hit more than a mil­lion retail investors news of his arrest should­n’t sur­prise anyone.

Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cials made these state­ments as they met with the cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange’s bank­rupt­cy team to dis­cuss whether FTX fraud­u­lent­ly moved hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars just before fil­ing for bank­rupt­cy last November.

Dami­an Williams, USA: This after­noon, Bahami­an author­i­ties arrest­ed Samuel Bankman-Freed at the request of the US gov­ern­ment, based on a sealed indict­ment filed by SDNY. He plans to file an indict­ment in the morn­ing, so I’ll give you more infor­ma­tion then.

Bankman-Fried was sched­uled to tes­ti­fy before the House Finan­cial Ser­vices Com­mit­tee on Tuesday.

How­ev­er, as U.S. Attor­ney Dami­an Williams explained in a tweet Mon­day, Bankman-Fried has been detained “under a sealed indict­ment,” and will be dis­closed and explained in the morning.

“Obvi­ous­ly I made a lot of mis­takes. If I could do it again, I would do any­thing,” Bankman-Fried recent­ly tried to explain to The New York Times. “I have nev­er tried to defraud anyone”

The Bahamas gov­ern­ment is also accused of col­lu­sion by FTX itself, not by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice. Lawyers for the com­pa­ny said Mon­day (ahead of news of the arrests) that the Bahamas reg­u­la­tor, the oper­at­ing enti­ty, col­lud­ed with Bankman-Fried to con­trol funds illic­it­ly derived from all ques­tion­able trans­ac­tions that took place short­ly before bankruptcy.

Claimed to have helped move it to a cryp­to wallet.

Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO of FTX in Novem­ber and was replaced by John J. Ray III, the exec­u­tive who held the helm dur­ing Enron’s bank­rupt­cy pro­ceed­ings. In prepara­to­ry remarks for con­gres­sion­al hear­ings on Tues­day, Ray paints a bleak pic­ture of the final phase of FTX’s man­age­ment and operations.

In it, FTX ran $5 bil­lion in spend­ing through the end of 2021 and ear­ly 2022, cit­ing “a myr­i­ad of busi­ness­es and invest­ments, many of which may be worth only a frac­tion of what we paid.” said it had made numer­ous loans and pay­ments worth more than $1 bil­lion to “insid­ers.”

These funds were also inter­min­gled with funds from anoth­er Bankman-Fried firm, Alame­da Research, which also engaged in high-risk mar­gin trad­ing with client funds.

Depend­ing on what the South­ern Dis­trict Attor­ney’s Office announces tomor­row, Bankman-Fried could spend a long time in prison.

Wire fraud and bank fraud of this mag­ni­tude would risk Bankman-Fried to life in prison with­out parole, accord­ing to CNBC’s Legal Commission.

For­mer Ther­a­nos CEO Eliz­a­beth Holmes and COO Sun­ny Bal­wani have just been sen­tenced to 11 and 12 years in prison, respec­tive­ly, for their roles in a mas­sive health care com­pa­ny fraud case.

In 2009, Ponzi scheme tycoon Bernie Mad­off was sen­tenced to 150 years in prison, and in 2006, Jeff Skilling, who was involved in the Enron bank­rupt­cy, was sen­tenced to 24 years in prison.