‘Shark Tank’ investor Kevin O’Leary says that he’ll get his money back from FTX and that the exchange needs to be audited before Sam Bankman-Fried can be found guilty of wrongdoing

The “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that he would get his money back from FTX and that the collapsed crypto exchange needed to be audited before its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, could be found guilty of any wrongdoing.

“I’ve told all of my lawyers: Keep your phasers on stun until we have facts. Then we’re going to get that money back,” O’Leary said, later adding: “Who’s going to jail? I have no idea. Who was fraudulent? I have no idea. But I will find out.”

O’Leary was a paid FTX spokesperson and an investor in the exchange, and he had corporate accounts on the platform.

FTX’s fall has roiled crypto markets over the past month, and details of mismanagement and bad governance have steadily trickled out of bankruptcy proceedings. FTX had no in-house accounting department, and it’s said to have comingled customer funds with funds of Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s crypto-trading arm.

Reuters has reported that FTX spent $100 million on luxury vacation homes in the Bahamas for its employees and that at least $1 billion in customer funds vanished from the exchange in the days following its bankruptcy.

In an interview at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit last week, Bankman-Fried denied accusations of fraud.

O’Leary jumped to Bankman-Fried’s defense in a recent tweet, though O’Leary told Yahoo Finance that his accounts were showing losses in the millions. He added that the firm would need to be audited before fraud allegations could be substantiated, and he demanded to see transparent records of his accounts.

O’Leary suggested that despite its chaotic financials, FTX is “100% auditable,” since crypto transactions are recorded in a public ledger on the blockchain.

“What we have now is everybody on earth raging against this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, saying he’s a fraudster, he stole the money, he took it to his own account, it’s hidden somewhere. How does anybody know that if we have no way to audit it?” O’Leary said, adding, “Are they not as baseless as what Sam Bankman-Fried is saying until we have the facts?”