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Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, October 5.

And this is your FT News Briefing.

FTX Founder Sam Bankman Fried had his first big day in court yesterday.

World Cup is going intercontinental and Rishi Sunak is cutting back on a long promised high-speed

rail project. I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

The trial against cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman Fried began this week,

opening statements happened yesterday in Manhattan. Investors sang nearly two billion

dollars into Bankman Fried's FTX exchange before collapsed last year and now SBF, as he's called,

is facing multiple fraud charges. Joe Miller is the FT's US legal correspondent and he's covering

the trial. Hey Joe, hi Mark. So remind listeners what Sam Bankman Fried is accused of.

Sam Bankman Fried is accused of essentially orchestrating a vast massive fraud on customers of

FTX. It became one of the world's biggest platforms on which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and

Ether and others were bought and sold and traded on. And essentially, as you mentioned there,

there was a dip in the crypto market last summer and during that downturn, it became apparent that

billions were allegedly missing from FTX's balance sheet that led to a run on the exchange

where people tried to withdraw their money and lo and behold that money was not there.

What are SBF's attorneys saying? I mean, what's his defense strategy?

Well, this is what we've all been waiting for. Opening arguments began in the trial first.

We heard from the government and then we heard from Bankman Fried's lawyer Mark Cohen.

And essentially what he said is that the government has painted his client as this kind of cartoon

...