Millionaire Canadian businessman and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary has told the US Senate Banking Committee, which is investigating the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange, that rival platform Binance “intentionally” put the company out of business.
This is despite FTX’s new chief executive John Ray telling the committee on Tuesday that Binance had nothing to do with exchange’s collapse.
“In my view, these two behemoths that own the unregulated market together and grow these incredible businesses in terms of growth were at war with each other and one put the other out of business intentionally,” Mr O’Leary, who was paid about $15 million to be an ambassador and spokesman for FTX, said as he gave evidence before the congressional hearing on Wednesday.
“Maybe there is nothing wrong with love and war, but Binance is a massive unregulated global monopoly now; they put FTX out of business.”
However, Mr Ray, a lawyer and insolvency specialist who oversaw Enron’s bankruptcy, said that FTX was not solvent and Binance did not cause its collapse.
“[Mr Bankman-Fried] spends a considerable amount of time talking about Binance and how Binance effectively created a run on the bank, suggesting that had that not occurred, FTX was solvent and would have been just fine. Prior to that episode, is your belief that FTX was solvent?", Congressman Anthony Gonzalez asked Mr Ray.
“No,” Mr Ray replied.
“I thought so,” Mr Gonzalez said.
When contacted for comment on Thursday, Binance said: “As per the SEC complaint, especially sections 76 & 77, and John Ray's testimony, Kevin O'Leary's statement is categorically false.”
Mr Bankman-Fried, 30, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday after federal prosecutors in the US charged him with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud, for allegedly misusing billions of dollars in customers’ funds before the $9 billion collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, his cryptocurrency trading company.
Appearing in court in Nassau on Tuesday, Mr Bankman-Fried was denied bail and remanded in custody as the judge said he was too big of a flight risk to be released.
“I am not satisfied that there is any condition that I could place in Samuel Bankman-Fried to sufficiently satisfy, because of his access to substantial finances, that he would not and could not abscond,” said Judge Joyce Ferguson-Pratt.
Mr Bankman-Fried is being held in the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services prison until his extradition hearing on February 8.
FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in the US on November 11 in the highest-profile cryptocurrency exchange failure to date, after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal, Reuters reported.
In response to the collapse of FTX, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum plummeted but have since pared back most of their losses.
Watch: What is Bitcoin and how did it start?
Mr Bankman-Fried, who cofounded FTX with Gary Wang and Nishad Singh in 2019, and Alameda Research in 2017, resigned as chief executive of FTX on the same day as the bankruptcy filing.
On November 6, billionaire rival Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, chief executive of Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, fuelled speculation about the financial health of the company in a tweet that snowballed into $6 billion of withdrawals from the exchange, Reuters reported at the time.
A month later, on December 9, Mr Zhao posted a series of 11 tweets in response to similar claims Mr O’Leary made about Binance during an interview with US business news channel CNBC.
“It seems $15m not only changed @kevinolearytv’s mind about crypto, it also made him align with a fraudster. Is he seriously defending SBF?” Mr Zhao said in the tweet.
The tweet included a link to the interview and the comment: “Baseless attacks start around 4:20.”
Mr O’Leary told the hearing that he contacted Mr Bankman-Fried after his accounts were stripped of their assets to ask him where the money had gone.
“I said, ‘Sam, walk me back 24 months [and] tell me the use of proceeds, the assets of your company — where did you spend it?’” Mr O’Leary, who estimates he lost $9.1 million when FTX collapsed, said.
“And then he told me about a transaction that occurred over the last 24 months, the repurchase of his shares from Binance, his competitor,” he said.
“I didn’t know this at the time but at some point, CZ or Binance … purchased 20 per cent ownership in Sam Bankman-Fried’s firm for seed stock.”
Mr O’Leary testified that Mr Bankman-Fried told him he paid $2 billion for the share buyback from Binance.
But 24 hours later, during another conversation between the two, he was told that it “could have been as much as $3 billion to buy back the shares from CZ”.
“I asked him, ‘What would compel you to do that? Why wouldn’t you keep your assets on your balance sheet, why would you offer this to just one shareholder?’” Mr O’Leary said.
“He said, ‘Because every time we went to get licensing in different jurisdictions … CZ would not comply with the regulators to question these different geographies, these different jurisdictions to provide the data that would clear them for a licence. He withheld it, according to Sam Bankman-Fried’.”
“The only option management and Sam Bankman-Fried had was to buy him out at an extraordinary valuation of close to $32 billion with apparently a 15 per cent discount,” he said.
However, Mr Ray told the committee hearing that he had never seen “such an utter failure of corporate controls at every level of an organisation, from the lack of financial statements to a complete failure of any internal controls or governance whatsoever”.
Mr Ray also sought to assure regulators in the US and other jurisdictions as his team worked to repair relationships with them.
“I completely understand the depth of outrage and frustration with what happened,” Mr Ray said.
“I have instructed my team to co-operate as comprehensively and completely as possible, and much of our time so far has been spent on the truly Herculean task of gathering and organising information responsive to the many requests we have received.”
KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
'The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window'
Director:Michael Lehmann
Stars:Kristen Bell
Rating: 1/5
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
MATCH INFO
Barcelona 4 (Suarez 27', Vidal 32', Dembele 35', Messi 78')
Sevilla 0
Red cards: Ronald Araujo, Ousmane Dembele (Barcelona)
Specs
Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric
Range: Up to 610km
Power: 905hp
Torque: 985Nm
Price: From Dh439,000
Available: Now
Game Changer
Director: Shankar
Stars: Ram Charan, Kiara Advani, Anjali, S J Suryah, Jayaram
Rating: 2/5
Moon Music
Artist: Coldplay
Label: Parlophone/Atlantic
Number of tracks: 10
Rating: 3/5
Essentials
The flights
Emirates and Etihad fly direct from the UAE to Geneva from Dh2,845 return, including taxes. The flight takes 6 hours.
The package
Clinique La Prairie offers a variety of programmes. A six-night Master Detox costs from 14,900 Swiss francs (Dh57,655), including all food, accommodation and a set schedule of medical consultations and spa treatments.
One in four Americans don't plan to retire
Nearly a quarter of Americans say they never plan to retire, according to a poll that suggests a disconnection between individuals' retirement plans and the realities of ageing in the workforce.
Experts say illness, injury, layoffs and caregiving responsibilities often force older workers to leave their jobs sooner than they'd like.
According to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research, 23 per cent of workers, including nearly two in 10 of those over 50, don't expect to stop working. Roughly another quarter of Americans say they will continue working beyond their 65th birthday.
According to government data, about one in five people 65 and older was working or actively looking for a job in June. The study surveyed 1,423 adults in February this year.
For many, money has a lot to do with the decision to keep working.
"The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn't gone up that much," says Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Centre for Retirement Research at Boston College. "So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement."
When asked how financially comfortable they feel about retirement, 14 per cent of Americans under the age of 50 and 29 per cent over 50 say they feel extremely or very prepared, according to the poll. About another four in 10 older adults say they do feel somewhat prepared, while just about one-third feel unprepared.
"One of the things about thinking about never retiring is that you didn't save a whole lot of money," says Ronni Bennett, 78, who was pushed out of her job as a New York City-based website editor at 63.
She searched for work in the immediate aftermath of her layoff, a process she describes as akin to "banging my head against a wall." Finding Manhattan too expensive without a steady stream of income, she eventually moved to Portland, Maine. A few years later, she moved again, to Lake Oswego, Oregon. "Sometimes I fantasise that if I win the lottery, I'd go back to New York," says Ms Bennett.
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo
Power: 261hp at 5,500rpm
Torque: 405Nm at 1,750-3,500rpm
Transmission: 9-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 6.9L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh117,059
The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
Profile
Company name: Marefa Digital
Based: Dubai Multi Commodities Centre
Number of employees: seven
Sector: e-learning
Funding stage: Pre-seed funding of Dh1.5m in 2017 and an initial seed round of Dh2m in 2019
Investors: Friends and family
Why are asylum seekers being housed in hotels?
The number of asylum applications in the UK has reached a new record high, driven by those illegally entering the country in small boats crossing the English Channel.
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
Asylum seekers and their families can be housed in temporary accommodation while their claim is assessed.
The Home Office provides the accommodation, meaning asylum seekers cannot choose where they live.
When there is not enough housing, the Home Office can move people to hotels or large sites like former military bases.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Pharaoh's curse
British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition to find the Tutankhamun tomb, died in a Cairo hotel four months after the crypt was opened.
He had been in poor health for many years after a car crash, and a mosquito bite made worse by a shaving cut led to blood poisoning and pneumonia.
Reports at the time said Lord Carnarvon suffered from “pain as the inflammation affected the nasal passages and eyes”.
Decades later, scientists contended he had died of aspergillosis after inhaling spores of the fungus aspergillus in the tomb, which can lie dormant for months. The fact several others who entered were also found dead withiin a short time led to the myth of the curse.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
TUESDAY'S ORDER OF PLAY
Centre Court
Starting at 2pm:
Elina Svitolina (UKR) [3] v Jennifer Brady (USA)
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova (RUS) v Belinda Bencic (SUI [4]
Not before 7pm:
Sofia Kenin (USA) [5] v Elena Rybakina (KAZ)
Maria Sakkari (GRE) v Aryna Sabalenka (BLR) [7]
Court One
Starting at midday:
Karolina Muchova (CZE) v Katerina Siniakova (CZE)
Kristina Mladenovic (FRA) v Aliaksandra Sasnovich (BLR)
Veronika Kudermetova (RUS) v Dayana Yastermska (UKR)
Petra Martic (CRO) [8] v Su-Wei Hsieh (TPE)
Sorana Cirstea (ROU) v Anett Kontaveit (EST)
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
The specs: 2018 Jaguar F-Type Convertible
Price, base / as tested: Dh283,080 / Dh318,465
Engine: 2.0-litre inline four-cylinder
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Power: 295hp @ 5,500rpm
Torque: 400Nm @ 1,500rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 7.2L / 100km
