2023-11-03 03:35:50
Updated Friday, November 3, 2023 – 02:35
The jury considers that the decisions he made were key to the disappearance of 8,000 million dollars from the FTX platform
Bankman-Fried, in the New York courthouse, in March 2023TIMOTHY A. CLARYAFP
Former cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty Thursday by a New York jury of all charges against him for fraud, embezzlement and criminal conspiracy.
The jury reached its decision after five weeks of trial, and Bankman-Fried now faces up to 110 years in prison. The sentence will be set later.
The federal process that lasted more than a month was a tough test for Bankman-Fried after some of his closest associates testified that he was key in all the decisions that led to some $8 billion disappearing from the trading platform. from FTX.
31 years old, Bankman-Fried was until the end of last year the wonder boy of the cryptocurrency industry with an estimated fortune of $26 billion, according to Fortune magazine, before the spectacular collapse of his empire.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors portrayed the defendant as an extremely intelligent man consumed by greed who knew what he was doing when FTX funds were secretly funneled into an investment fund under his control.
“Find him guilty,” U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon said earlier Thursday.
“He was ambitious” and had “the arrogance to think he could get away with fraud,” he added.
The defense said their client had acted in “good faith” and was overwhelmed by circumstances and the financial ineptitude of his close associates who testified against him to obtain plea bargains.
The star witness in the trial was the former colleague and occasional girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, who told the jury that they stole “about 14 billion” from customers of the FTX cryptocurrency platform before it went bankrupt last year.
In your own pocket
The money was used to prop up Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s personal hedge fund for which he had tapped Ellison as CEO.
In November 2022, the FTX cryptocurrency empire imploded with massive withdrawal requests from users who panicked upon learning that some FTX funds had been compromised in risky Alameda Research investments.
Such money had been used to finance risky investment deals, political contributions, as well as expensive properties in the Bahamas.
They also went to pay tens of millions of dollars to celebrities, including Tom Brady y Gisele Bundchen, to show their support for FTX and to purchase the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium.
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