Biden administration doesn’t touch FTX mastermind Nishad Singh

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No one is talking about one of the key masterminds of fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, despite the fact that just within the span of couple of years he has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars through Alameda Research, an enterprise run by Caroline Ellison, ex-girlfriend of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). According to media reports, a year after Nishad Singh became board member of FTX, he quietly emerged as one of the key donors of the Democratic Party. Nonpartisan campaign watchdog OpenSecrets said, Singh donated US$8 million to federal campaigns in 2022 midterm elections and all of it went to Democrats and Sigh was deeply involved with financing the 2022 midterms.

Nishad Singh was one of a handful of FTX executives, including former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who made massive contributions in the 2022 midterm elections before the company’s collapse.

According to state federal campaign finance records, Nishad Singh has donated more than US$13 million to Democratic Party since the start of the 2020 presidential campaign.


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Nishad Singh held a 7.83 percent stake in the business silo that included FTX.US, which was worth about US$572 million in March 2022, and received a US$543 million loan from Alameda Research, according to bankruptcy documents. He was likely one of the five co-workers that Sam Bankman-Fried pegged as a billionaire when asked earlier this year.

Where is Nishad Singh?

Since FTX’s downfall in November 2022, one of the firm’s key executives, Nishad Singh, has remained out of the public eye even as other top figures have ended up in the crosshairs of investigations into the exchange.

While most of the attention in the media has been paid to Sam Bankman-Fried, there were other executive involved in what prosecutors have called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American History”, including Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang. Both have pleaded guilty to charges they defrauded investors and are cooperating with prosecutors.


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Nishad Singh was one of few people who had knew that FTX was misusing customer funds, along with Bankman-Fried, Ellison, and Wang.

Nishad Singh was a high school friend of Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother, Gabe. The former executive worked for a time as an engineer at Facebook (now Meta) before Bankman-Fried recruited him for Alameda, according to Singh’s LinkedIn page, which has been taken down.

Nisahd Singh joined Alameda Research, a hedge fund run by Bankman-Fried, which now finds itself at the centre of the controversy. Crypto publication CoinDesk reported on a leaked document that appeared to show that Alameda Research held an unusually large amount of FTT tokens. FTX and Alameda are meant to be separate businesses, but the report claimed that they had close financial ties, according to The New York Times.

Forty per cent of Alameda’s balance sheet comprised FTX’s FTT tokens, which raised eyebrows among crypto experts.

In April 2019, Nishad Singh moved to FTX and has occupied the top post of director of engineering since. Now his role in the collapse of the crypto exchange is under scrutiny. There are allegations of rampant nepotism, conflict of interest, and lack of oversight at FTX.


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“The whole operation was run by a gang of kids in the Bahamas,” a person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk.

“Gary, Nishad and Sam control the code, the exchange’s matching engine and funds If they moved them around or input their own numbers, I’m not sure who would notice”, he alleged.

A source told CoinDesk that the trio – Bankman-Fried, Wang, and Singh – will do anything for each other. Around 10 people were part of the close group and they all are and used to be paired up in romantic relationships with each other.

This “gang”, which included Singh, knew that FTX siphoned off customer funds into Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried had secretly transferred US$10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Alameda, reports Reuters.

Caroline Ellison told Alameda employees in a video meeting that she, Sam Bankman-Fried, and two other executives, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, were aware of the decision to move customer funds to Alameda, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

While Sam Banman-Fried and his parents are now secretly making lobbying promising large sum of cash for “saving” SBF from possible legal consequences and imprisonment, two other top figures Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are busy in saving themselves by “cooperating” with the investigators. But, in this case, the only man – one of the top beneficiaries of FTX Ponzi scheme – Nishad Singh is completely out of radar. No one knows where he is.

Seeking anonymity, a source told Blitz, while SBF and two others are busy with legal stuff, Nishad Singh is working on secretly transferring a large amount of FTX loot-cash to several countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain India, and a number of Caribbean island nations including Dominica with the help of some influential Indians who are in illegal hawala business for decades. The source further said, Nishad Singh was maintaining communications with Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit through an individual named Paul Singh, the Caribbean island nation’s agent in London. Paul Singh has earlier helped a large number of scammers and black-money holders from several countries in secretly transferring their money to Dominica and other countries.

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