Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of FTX, has finally been sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing a whopping $8 billion from his own platform’s clients. In total, he faces seven charges of conspiracy and fraud, stemming from the collapse of FTX.
The judge Lewis Kaplan has been the one who has issued the sentence, which has finally turned out to be shorter than the 40 to 50 years that the prosecutors were asking for. Before announcing the verdict, Judge Kaplan described Fried’s defense claim as “misleading“, with “logical flaws” and “speculative“.
Kaplan also considered that Bankman-Fried tried to manipulate the witnesses, in addition to falsely declaring when he learned about the disappearance of the 8 billion dollars. As we can read through Bloomberg, Kaplan points out that “a thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a sentence discount using his Las Vegas winnings.”
During the trial, his former collaborators testified against Bankman-Fried and claimed that they were ordered to use funds belonging to FTX clients to hide the losses of Alameda Research. The latter was a cryptocurrency trading company, also co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried.
Bankman-Fried’s statements could not have been more incriminating. The defendant said he did not remember publicly speaking about the reliability of FTX. After this, the prosecution proceeded to reproduce them before him and the court. He also claimed that, although his employees told him that there was an $8 billion hole in the balance sheets, he did not care to find out where such amount had gone.
Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX in 2019 and quickly positioned it as one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
Source: The Verge
