National

PM: I Don’t Need To Be Chasing Ghosts

NASSAU, BAHAMAS – Prime Minister Philip Davis shutting down claims that he met with former FTX Sam Bankman-Fried to discuss paying off the country’s national debt.

Published

2 years ago

October 3, 2023

Jameelha Missick

NASSAU, BAHAMAS – Prime Minister Philip Davis shutting down claims that he met with former FTX Sam Bankman-Fried to discuss paying off the country’s national debt.

Davis was pressed by reporters following an Inter-American meeting on sustainable development at the Atlantis Resort on Tuesday.

On Monday, The Times of London published an excerpt of a biography of Bankman-Fried written by author Michael Lewis.

The book, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” is being released.

The excerpt said and quote, “Sam explained that he was trying to decide whether simply to pay off the $9 billion Bahamas national debt himself, so the country could fix roads and build schools and so on, adding that he’d recently met the new prime minister to discuss this idea and some others.”

The excerpt also claimed that after the Bahamian General Election in September 2021, Sam was the first person the prime minister had wanted to meet.

On Monday, the Office of the Prime Minister sought to clarify the reports surrounding the PM’s meeting with Bankman-Fried noting that discussions between the two were strictly confined to FTX’s relocation and its operations in The Bahamas, specifically concerning the invitation extended to the prime minister for the inauguration of FTX’s new headquarters.

In one of his last on-camera interviews before his arrest in The Bahamas, back in December 2022, Bankman-Fried spoke exclusively with our Jerome Sawyer about the FTX implosion.

Bankman-Fried’s six-week fraud trial in a Manhattan federal court began Tuesday.