New York – November 1, 2024 – Cooley navigated Nishad Singh, former FTX director of engineering, through the highest-profile and fastest-moving financial fraud investigation in decades.
Singh was one of Sam Bankman-Fried’s top lieutenants and was alleged to have conspired with Bankman-Fried and others to use billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to pay large expenditures for FTX’s sister company, Alameda Research. Singh also was involved in what the government alleged to be one of the largest campaign finance offenses in US history.
On October 30, 2024, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said that he was “persuaded” by Singh’s cooperation in the investigation, and that Singh was put in a difficult position by Bankman-Fried. Judge Kaplan did not impose any prison time and instead ordered Singh to contribute funds to the $11.2 billion forfeiture tab and spend three years on supervision.
In addition to representing Singh in the investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), Cooley also represents Singh before the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office in the highly visible criminal and civil investigation.
The US attorney for the SDNY called the collapse of FTX “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”
The Cooley team was led by partners Andrew Goldstein and Russell Capone, with support from associates Anu Dhillon and Jorge Sarmiento. The team earned a runners-up spot on The American Lawyer’s Litigation Daily Litigator of the Week Runners-Up and Shout-Outs list for the work. AP News, Axios, CNBC, CoinDesk, Bloomberg, Law360, The New York Times and Reuters also reported on the matter.
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