Wall Street bigshot who hired SBF 'duped into funding South Sudan coup plot'

Robert Granieri — the co-founder of trading firm Jane Street Group, which once gave jailed crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried his big break in finance — was allegedly deceived into funding a plot to purchase AK-47s, Stinger missiles, and grenades for a coup in South Sudan, according to court papers.Federal prosecutors in Arizona first charged Harvard Fellow Peter Ajak and Abraham Keech in March 2024 with conspiring to illegally export arms to South Sudan, their home country, to overthrow its government.Both have pleaded not guilty.Granieri, 53, allegedly provided $7 million in two payments after meeting Ajak in February 2024 at a Midtown Manhattan condominium, prosecutors said.Ajak’s lawyers stated in a May court filing, which was reviewed by The Post and first reported by Bloomberg, that Granieri’s financing was “vital to the plan.”They claimed in the May 29 court document that without his support, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible.The attorney for the Jane Street founder, whose firm hired now-convicted fraudster and former FTX CEO Bankman-Fried in 2013, claimed he was misled by Ajak, whom he believed was a human rights activist.“Granieri is a longtime supporter of human rights causes,” his lawyer was quoted by Bloomberg as saying.

“In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions.”The case also references chess champion Garry Kasparov, though he is not named as a defendant nor accused of any wrongdoing, for allegedly connecting Ajak with Granieri through their shared work with the Human Rights Foundation.Ajak, a former child soldier who resettled in the US, studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School and worked as a World Bank economist before becoming a South Sudanese opposition activist.He and Keech allegedly met with an undercover agent and inspected weapons in a Phoenix warehouse before their arrest, the May 29 motion said.Defense attorneys allege US authorities were awar...