After more attention has been cast on the former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, a report details that Ellison has hired Wilmerhale partner Stephanie Avakian, an attorney that worked for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The news follows leaked documentation of Ellison’s alleged margin position, and the ex-Alameda executive reportedly being spotted at a cafe in Soho.
Ex-Alameda Research Exec Is Reportedly Being Represented by Former SEC Official
Just recently, the FTX co-founder and former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), said that he was “willing to testify” on Dec. 13, 2022, before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. In the meantime, the media and crypto community members have been focused on the whereabouts of former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison.
The ex-Alameda executive has been silent since FTX collapsed and it was once assumed she was in Hong Kong. Speculators also reported on Nov. 26 that Ellison allegedly left Hong Kong and fled to Dubai, but those reports were unverified. In more recent times, an FTX insider shared an alleged document reportedly tied to Ellison that showed a negative FTX margin balance of around $1.3 billion in May 2022.
Additionally, a Twitter account called Autism Capital tweeted that Ellison may have been spotted at a cafe in Manhattan with the FTX team’s office dog Gopher. This weekend, Bloomberg reported that sources say, Stephanie Avakian, a partner at white-shoe law firm Wilmerhale, is representing the former Alameda CEO.
“Stephanie Avakian, [a] former enforcement division chief at the Securities and Exchange Commission, is representing Ellison along with other lawyers at her firm, [Wilmerhale], according to people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison wrote on Dec. 10, 2022.
The news follows reports that detailed SBF purportedly retained attorney Mark Cohen, the lawyer who represented Ghislaine Maxwell during her recent sex trafficking case. SBF’s new attorney was disclosed by SBF’s spokesperson, Mark Botnick. As far as Ellison’s alleged attorney, Avakian, the lawyer became a partner of the law firm Wilmerhale in 2020. The lawyer has been involved with high-profile law cases associated with Tesla’s Elon Musk, Ripple Labs, and General Electric.
Stephanie Avakian is the former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement director. Avakian left the SEC role in 2020 to join Wilmerhale, but during her time with the SEC, she worked with the enforcement crackdowns against initial coin offerings (ICOs) that started in 2017.
According to Bloomberg and reporters at the New York Post, representatives from the law firm Wilmerhale have not commented on reports concerning Ellison’s ostensible representation. If the reports about SBF’s and Ellison’s alleged legal representations are true, the two have managed to retain two prestigious lawyers to defend them.
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What do you think about the report that says Caroline Ellison allegedly retained the prestigious attorney Stephanie Avakian? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman
Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
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