Sam Bankman-Fried backed charity sounds alarm to UK regulators after

A charity backed by Sam Bankman-Fried and his failed cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, has sounded alarms to regulators in the United Kingdom that raise questions about the viability of the nonprofits he’s funded.

The Charity Commission for England and Wales, a U.K. agency that regulates nonprofits, said one of the charities there filed a “serious incident report” tied to “the collapse of FTX,” according to an email sent Wednesday in response to questions from CNBC.

Lawyers for FTX have said the company was “effectively run as a personal fiefdom of Sam Bankman-Fried.” The founder and former CEO is facing a barrage of civil and reportedly criminal investigations after transferring billions in customer funds from FTX, the crypto trading platform he founded in 2019, to Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm he founded in 2017. Questions about the stability of FTX’s holdings caused a liquidity run that put both companies into bankruptcy earlier this month.

Bankman-Fried, FTX and Alameda Research, among other entities he controlled, helped finance the Oxford-based Centre for Effective Altruism, which is now called the Effective Ventures Foundation, the U.K. headquartered charity network that filed the report with the commission. Bankman-Fried also served as the treasurer of the Centre’s U.S. arm from 2013 through 2015 and sat on its board from 2016 through 2018, according to its tax filings with the IRS.

Bankman-Fried’s donations are at least in the multiple millions of dollars with public pledges to give billions more. But the implosion of his firms amid a tsunami of new legal troubles casts doubt on the future of the charities he helped underwrite.

“We can confirm that in line with our guidance, Effective Ventures Foundation (of which the Centre for Effective Altruism is a project) has filed a serious incident report relating to the collapse of FTX,” said Polly Kettenacker, a spokeswoman for the Charity Commission, declining to disclose further details. “We are engaging with the charity around this matter.”  

The commission didn’t specify why it filed the report, but nonprofits in the U.K. are required to submit serious incident reports under a handful of circumstances, including the “loss of your charity’s money or assets” or “harm to your charity’s work or reputation,” according to the commission’s website.

The charities Bankman-Fried backed were boosting the so-called effective altruism movement, which claims to use research and data to find the best ways to help others. However, it’s more often been criticized as a public relations ploy used by the super rich to convince the public they’re helping society by donating some of their money to worthy social causes.

“Effective Ventures has in the past received grants from Alameda Research and FTX/Alameda employees. We also received donations from FTX Future Fund and related individuals and organizations,” spokesman Shakeel Hashim confirmed in an email. “We used these funds to support our charitable…