SBF's Father Reportedly Covering Legal Bills Using Alameda-Sourced Monetary Gift

The father of Sam Bankman-Fried is paying his disgraced son's legal fees, as the founder of befallen cryptocurrency exchange FTX faces multiple charges related to fraud, a new report revealed.

According to a Forbes report Wednesday, Joseph Bankman, who is a tax law expert and a professor at the Stanford Law School, is covering SBF's legal fees but it is unclear how much the 68-year-old is paying to attorneys working on his son's defense. The tax law expert is reportedly using money borrowed from hedge fund Alameda Research, FTX's sister company, the report said.

Two sources with knowledge of the operations in both FTX and Alameda told the outlet that SBF gave a large monetary gift to his father in 2021 using a loan from Alameda, which is FTX's trading firm. At that time, SBF was still the CEO of FTX.

The Forbes report said that SBF received at least $10 million in customer deposits from Alameda, which he transferred to his father using his lifetime estate and gift tax exemption.

"FTX debtors claim that Bankman-Fried improperly received $2.2 billion in company loans, and alleged this month that $8.9 billion in customer deposits are still missing," the report said.

While it is unclear how much exactly SBF's legal counsel is charging for his defense, a source close to the fallen FTX founder said defense costs are likely in the single-digit millions. The 31-year-old entrepreneur is being represented by Christian Everdell and Mark Cohen of Cohen & Gresser.

Cohen and Everdell were former federal prosecutors who provided legal advice to Ghislaine Maxwell, sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's ex-girlfriend who was convicted late in 2021 of sex trafficking a minor. The two lawyers also have experience working on the case of the drug lord and infamous prison escapee "El Chapo."

Aside from Cohen and Everdell, SBF is also receiving pro bono advice from criminal defense attorney David W. Mills, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. Mills is also a Stanford Law professor and a close friend of Bankman-Fried's father.

After his son's arrest in the Bahamas in December, Joseph Bankman reportedly told a non-profit that he would spend "substantially all of my resources on Sam's defense," according to The New York Times.

Meanwhile, SBF is facing another charge that alleges he paid a $40 million bribe to Chinese officials to get his hedge fund's accounts un-freezed. Prosecutors said the Chinese government froze Alameda accounts as part of a probe into an unidentified counterparty.

According to the indictment, SBF orchestrated the alleged bribe from Alameda's main trading account to a private wallet to convince Chinese government officials to unfreeze Alameda accounts that held over $1 billion in cryptocurrency.

SBF is facing more than a dozen criminal charges, including four counts of fraud, conspiracy, and recent charges that alleged the well-known political donor conspired with two former FTX executives to donate tens of millions of dollars in efforts to influence lawmakers to favor bills that would benefit the exchange.