The founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX has to spend a long time in prison. In the billion-dollar fraud trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, Judge Lewis Kaplan set the sentence at 25 years on Thursday after a jury found the 32-year-old guilty in November.
Under Bankman-Fried’s direction, customer funds from the FTX trading platform were secretly pumped into a hedge fund. When these deals fell through, FTX was left with a billion-dollar hole.
“Life shaped by greed”
The Public Prosecution Service had demanded forty to fifty years in prison. “His life in recent years has been marked by incomparable greed and hubris, by ambition and self-justification, by a willingness to take risks and repeatedly play with other people’s money,” she wrote in explanation.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers, on the other hand, had argued for more than five to six and a half years in prison. Your client is by no means the “supervillain” described by the prosecutor. The required prison sentence was “medieval”. They also pointed out that FTX customers will get a large portion of their money back. Judge Kaplan did not accept this argument. “A thief who brings his loot to Las Vegas and successfully gambles with the stolen money is not entitled to any relief from his sentence by using his Las Vegas winnings to repay the stolen money.”
Friedman apologized
In a statement, Bankman-Fried apologized to his former employees. ‘I’m sorry for what happened. There were things I should have done and said, and things I shouldn’t have done.” Some of his former associates had pleaded guilty and accused Bankman-Fried of his fraud trial.
The jury found it proven that Bankman-Fried, known for his appearances in jeans and T-shirt and for his characteristic mane of hair, had embezzled eight billion dollars of customer money out of sheer greed to speculate and finance his lavish money. lifestyle. Although he admitted errors in the trial, he rejected the fraud charge several times.
Parents were present at the hearing
He had also announced that he would appeal against the verdict and the amount of the sentence. In addition to Bankman-Fried, his parents, college professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, attended Thursday’s hearing.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
