Samuel Bankman-Fried proved extremely generous with other people's money (OPM), and his generosity is now paying off.

He may be able to slip through the judicial cracks as the former "wonder boy" of the now defunct cryptocurrency empire, FTX, having greased the palms of Democrat operatives at the top of the political heap.  The sum of $40 million has been bandied about as his personal giveaway chest, but that would be hopelessly understating Mr. Bankman-Fried's largesse, according to Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter.

Musk is currently data-mining global Twitter accounts, and he estimates Bankman-Fried's political investments at closer to $1 billion.  There has been a treasure trove of information withheld from the public, but that's dramatically changing under Musk's ownership.

All that money has led to Bankman-Fried finding a friend in Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) among numerous others.  She wrote the crypto con artist a very polite letter asking him to appear before the House Financial Services Committee.  And her invitation read as if she sympathized with the self-appointed altruistic thinker who wanted to save the world.  But the world let him down.

"We appreciate that you've been candid in your discussions about what happened at FTX," wrote Waters.  "Your willingness to talk to the public will help the company's customers, investors and others."

Waters has never been known for subtlety, but her sensitive kumbaya approach to the grand $30-billion swindle will certainly enrage investors.  They are not interested in the top con-artist's explanation of what happened, but rather the regulatory agencies that failed them all the while they invested their funds in FTX, having been told those accounts belonged to them.

They now have learned otherwise.  Bankman-Fried funneled their privately held monies into Alameda Research, a side cryptocurrency hedge fund and quasi-banking institute, which the 30-year-old corrupt executive treated as a private piggy bank.  As head of the Alameda trading operation (without a physical location or guidelines for funding), he could apply for loans and approve his own loans.

That proved most convenient, and it eliminated a lot of paperwork involving due diligence to process the funding request.

Such facts may lead to Waters qualifying to appear before her own committee.  She was on the receiving end of Bankman-Fried's political giveaways.  The situation is already proving to be problematic for Waters, who didn't think to recuse herself from the Financial Services Committee after being compromised by her monetary relationship with the potential witness.

"Do you plan to give the money back?" shouted out a reporter as Waters was on her way to a committee meeting in Washington.

"I can't talk about that right now," she said as she quickened her pace to enter the building.  Many of her investors could not think of a better time for Waters to answer the question.

Waters may wish to entertain the thought of taking the investigation into a more productive direction.  She could save the taxpayers a lot of money by skipping over the invitation to Bankman-Fried and inviting John J. Ray, who has helped oversee some of the biggest bankruptcy filings (chief among them Enron) and made several statements on the record for a filing to Federal Bankruptcy Court.

Ray claims that in his 40 years of restructuring firms, he has never witnessed such an egregious lack of infrastructure, which in layman's terms suggests that the day-to-day operation of FTX was on par with the party scenes in the epic comedy Animal House.  The FTX group was known to party late into the night, indulge in excessive drug-taking, and participate in polyamorous relationships.

No wonder Bankman-Fried is now claiming he "can only guess" as to what happened to the missing funds.

Ray's overview offers a more substantive explanation and takes the guesswork out of FTX's sordid bankruptcy filing: "Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here," Ray said in the bankruptcy filing.  "From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals."

Bankman-Fried may wish to read the regulator's insights to better understand the financial global mess he left behind for others to clean up.

Image: FTX.