Love, betrayals, delusions of grandeur… The FTX saga finally reaches its conclusion. Found guilty of fraud in November following a five-week trial, Sam Bankman-Fried, the fallen darling of cryptos, was sentenced this Thursday, March 28 to 25 years in prison. New York prosecutor Damian Williams demanded between 40 and 50 years in prison for the former cryptocurrency star, whom a Manhattan jury had found guilty of the seven charges against him. One of the longest sentences in the history of white-collar crime in the United States, but still far behind the 150 years in prison to which businessman Bernard Madoff was sentenced in 2009. SBF” – its nickname – has already announced that it wants to appeal.
During the hearing, the former billionaire, who appeared emaciated and in a beige prison jumpsuit, apologized to his former colleagues who, for the most part, testified against him. “They put a lot of themselves into it, and I ruined it.”he admitted before US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, reports Reuters. Claiming to be “haunted every day” by bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried added: “I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry for what happened every step of the way. Things I should have done and said, things I shouldn’t have.
Not really enough to soften the judge who accused him of having lied on the stand when he claimed not to be aware of the incestuous links maintained by his hedge fund Alameda with his crypto platform FTX. Before announcing the sentence, he also spoke at length about the thirty-year-old’s excessive ambition as well as his lack of remorse during the affair.
“SBF” used, without their consent, the assets of customers of its digital currency exchange platform FTX, to carry out risky transactions via its sister company Alameda, to purchase real estate or to make political donations. Subject to massive withdrawal requests from panicked customers, FTX imploded in November 2022. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, around $9 billion was missing.
Liquidators
In a few hours, the image of the whimsical little genius, with full hair and perpetual shorts and t-shirts, collapsed to give way to that of a sorcerer’s apprentice, a fan of insane bets. The group’s liquidators have already recovered about $6.4 billion in cash and plan to fully reimburse injured customers. They are benefiting in particular from the brutal appreciation of cryptocurrencies, which have recovered after a catastrophic 2022 vintage marked by several bankruptcies and punctuated by the FTX scandal.
Driven by an influx of investors and the marketing of a new investment product, the queen of digital currencies, bitcoin, has set records since the beginning of March. Faced with the threat of a very heavy sentence, the lawyers of Sam Bankman-Fried, who has just celebrated his 32nd birthday, sought to portray a more human “SBF” than the manipulator described during his trial. “Those who know Sam know he is selfless, selfless,” his advice wrote in a document submitted to federal Judge Lewis Kaplan before the hearing, along with dozens of letters of support from loved ones. People who knew him “understand that his conduct was “never motivated by greed or a thirst for prestige””supported the lawyers, citing one of the testimonies.
The fact is that the former student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was never implicated for personal enrichment and kept, until the end, most of his fortune in FTX shares, whose value s ‘is evaporated. During his trial, which lasted five weeks, “SBF” lawyers presented him as a young business manager overwhelmed by his workload and victim of errors of judgment by his partners and employees.
To obtain clemency from the federal magistrate, they also mentioned the fact that this former trader had autism spectrum disorders, which makes him, according to them, “vulnerable within a prison population”. With these elements in mind, the lawyers suggest a sentence of between a little over five and six and a half years in prison. Since the verdict, Sam Bankman-Fried has changed his team of lawyers and notably enlisted the services of Marc Mukasey, much more extroverted and offensive than the discreet Mark Cohen, previously responsible for his defense.
“In every aspect of his activity and for each of the crimes committed, the accused showed a blatant lack of respect for the law”, retorted the services of prosecutor Williams. During the trial, Sam Bankman-Fried’s defense was weakened by the testimonies of three former executives of FTX and Alameda Research, including his former girlfriend, who all highlighted, in detail, the driving role of the accused in the fraud. “He understood the rules, but decided they didn’t apply to him,” insisted the prosecutor’s office in a document sent to the judge, evoking a “pernicious megalomania” And “a superiority complex”.