FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried was sentenced to nearly 25 years in prison on Thursday, concluding a criminal fraud trial involving $8 billion in losses to individual investors.
Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York cited Bankman-Fried’s “apparent lack of remorse” and sentenced the former billionaire to 24.25 years in prison, ordering him to pay up to $11 billion in investor and loan losses. and “flexibility toward truth.” The sentenced sentence is 15 years shorter than the sentence imposed by the prosecution.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers attempted to reshape the public perception of the cryptocurrency prodigy, calling him a “beautiful puzzler” who guided the ill-fated company with “mathematics in his head” rather than “malice in his heart.”
“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer who sets out every morning to harm people,” defense attorney Mark Mukasey said.
Judge Kaplan disagreed. The seasoned legal scholar highlighted three instances in which Bankman-Fried committed perjury during trial. The executive included one instance in which he claimed he learned there was a multibillion-dollar hole in Alameda’s balance sheet just before the cryptocurrency empire collapsed.
“He knew it was wrong. He knew it was a crime,” Judge Kaplan told a packed courtroom on Thursday.
The cryptocurrency mogul, dressed in a simple beige jumpsuit, remained stoic even as he learned of his fate. Standing upright with his hands clasped together like a dead corpse, he showed a markedly different attitude from his previous Kingpin persona. He bowed his head and stuttered his final remarks to the court ahead of the judge’s ruling.
“I made a selfish decision,” Bankman-Fried said in remarks that revisited some of the defense’s key arguments in the weeks-long criminal trial. Among those claims were claims that customers’ funds were lost due to a “liquidity crisis” triggered by FTX employees’ mismanagement of user accounts and the company’s extensive operations.
The former executive’s prepared remarks also included several nods to colleagues and co-conspirators Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
“They created something really beautiful, and I threw it all away,” Bankman-Fried said.
Bankman-Fried was found guilty Nov. 2 of seven criminal counts, including two counts each of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities and commodities fraud. The maximum prison sentence for these crimes is 110 years, according to probation officials.
Judge Kaplan recommended that Bankman-Fried serve his sentence in a medium- or low-security prison near California’s Bay Area. The judge found the former FTX CEO’s lack of social skills and ‘associations with vast wealth’ made him a target for attacks by fellow inmates.
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