Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Federal Court in New York for organizing an 8 billion dollars fraud that led to the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange. He was found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.
The judge called Sam Bankman-Fried ruthless as he handed down the 25-year sentence. Before reading the sentence, Judge Lewis Kaplan stated that “this was a very serious crime.”
Kaplan stated that Bankman-Fried’s persistence and marketing abilities meant that it was “not a trivial risk” that he would commit wrongdoing again in the future. He said that although Bankman-Fried said the word “sorry,” he “never expressed remorse for committing heinous crimes.”
The prosecution asked the court to sentence Bankman to 40 to 50 years in prison, arguing that he “stole 8 billion dollars from investors.”
“I emphasize – stole, because it was not a liquidity crisis move, nor mismanagement, nor poor judgment by the company’s leadership. It wasn’t just a financial loss on paper,” concluded the prosecutor.
Defense attorneys sought to have the FTX founder spend a maximum of 6.5 years in prison, considering that he is non-violent and has no prior criminal record.
“A lot of people do feel let down, and they are let down: I am very sorry for that,” said Sam Bankman before the judge pronounced the sentence.
“I’m sorry for everything that happened at every stage. There were things I had to do and things I shouldn’t have done. The collapse of FTX haunts me every day,” he added.
At the end of the trial, Judge Kaplan assessed that Bankman Fried is “extremely intelligent and suffers from autism.” He simultaneously agreed with the prosecution that the creator of FTX “wanted to be very, very influential politically in the country,” which drove him to crime.
FTX, which was among the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11th last year after traders withdrew 6 billion dollars from the platform in three days, and the competing exchange Binance backed out of a rescue deal.
The liquidity crisis occurred after Bankman-Fried secretly moved 10 billion dollars in FTX client funds to his other company, Alameda Research. At least a billion dollars of client funds went missing.
In a series of interviews and public statements in late November and December, Bankman-Fried admitted to management failures but attempted to distance himself from fraud allegations, saying he never knowingly commingled client funds on FTX with funds in his trading firm, Alameda Research, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
