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New Judge Assigned in Sam Bankman-Fried Fraud Case
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has replaced Ronnie Abrams, who recused herself because of a potential conflict of interest.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has been assigned to preside over the fraud case against former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Kaplan replaces U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams, who recused herself from the case on Friday because of a potential conflict of interest because her husband is a partner at law firm Davis Polk & Waddell, which advised FTX in 2021 and is now advising parties possibly adverse to FTX and Bankman-Fried in the exchange’s bankruptcy proceeding, according to Abrams.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Bankman-Fried is under house arrest on a $250 million bond and is scheduled to appear before the federal court on Jan. 3.
Kaplan was appointed to the Manhattan federal court by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and has presided over a number of high-profile cases, including Chevron’s 2014 appeal of an environmental case in which he ruled in favor of the oil giant, and 2021 sexual-assault case brought against Prince Andrew by Virginia Giuffre, which was settled out of court.
In 2020, Kaplan criticized some plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against blockchain firm Block.one for appearing to be an attempt to earn high legal fees. Block.one eventually agreed to pay $27.5 million to settle that case in a court-approved settlement.
Read more: The FTX Downfall: Full Coverage
UPDATE (Dec. 27, 19:21 UTC): Added info that Davis Polk previously advised FTX in 2021.
Nelson Wang
Nelson edits features and opinion stories and was previously CoinDesk’s U.S. News Editor for the East Coast. He has also been an editor at Unchained and DL News, and prior to working at CoinDesk, he was the technology stocks editor and consumer stocks editor at TheStreet. He has also held editing positions at Yahoo.com and Condé Nast Portfolio’s website, and was the content director for aMedia, an Asian American media company. Nelson grew up on Long Island, New York and went to Harvard College, earning a degree in Social Studies. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.
