Sam Bankman-Fried Enlists Expert Witness to Challenge Testimonies in Trial

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is enlisting the help of an expert witness to challenge the testimonies of key witnesses in his ongoing legal battle.

Bankman-Fried’s legal team has brought in Joseph Pimbley from PF2 Securities, a litigation consulting firm, to provide expert testimony, Cointelegraph reported Tuesday (Oct. 24), citing a Monday (Oct. 23) letter from Bankman-Fried’s legal team to New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan.

The objective is to counter claims made by former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, FTX Co-founder Gary Wang, former FTX Engineering Director Nishad Singh and former FTX employee Adam Yedidia regarding the financial ties between FTX and Alameda Research, according to the report.

In their letter to the judge, Bankman-Fried’s legal team expressed their intention to call Pimbley as an expert witness and said Pimbley would rely on FTX database information to present his findings, the report said. His testimony will focus on establishing a definitive timeline for Alameda’s line of credit with FTX.

Pimbley’s testimony is expected to provide insights into the fluctuating nature of Alameda’s line of credit with FTX, per the report. Based on FTX database information, he will assert that the line of credit varied between approximately $1 billion and $3 billion from October 2021 to September 2022, with a decrease in June 2022.

Additionally, Pimbley will present data indicating that the majority of non-FTX and non-Alameda user balances are held in United States dollars, bitcoin, ether and tether, according to the report. He will highlight that over 75% of these user balances are associated with accounts that have spot margin enabled, spot margin lending enabled or show futures activity.

This information could potentially challenge the testimonies of Ellison, Wang, Singh and Yedidia regarding Alameda’s line of credit and FTX customer use of margin trading, the report said.

Pimbley’s 54-page disclosure, which includes charts, spreadsheet excerpts, diagrams and database queries, aims to counter Ellison’s testimony that Alameda’s line of credit with FTX was “essentially unlimited” and Wang’s testimony that the trading firm borrowed “around $3 billion” from that credit line, per the report.

This report comes after the conclusion of the first three weeks of Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar criminal fraud trial, during which Ellison, Wang and Singh attacked Bankman-Fried’s character and told the jury it was him who directed them to commit the crimes they have all individually pleaded guilty to.

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