2024-04-03 18:33:34
By JT
Published yesterday at 8:33 p.m., Updated yesterday at 8:33 p.m.
Sam Bankman-Fried. Amanda Perobelli / REUTERS
Sentenced to 25 years in prison, he assured ABC News that he would “give anything to help repair even part of the damage” caused to 9 million customers.
This is his first speech since his conviction at the end of March. In a letter sent last weekend to ABC News from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the former boss of the FTX crypto exchange Sam Bankman-Fried, sentenced to 25 years in prison, expressed regrets about the management of his company. “That’s the main thing I think about every day.”, he confided. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, resulting in an $8 billion loss for its 9 million customers, Sam Bankman-Fried had resigned before the new owner filed for bankruptcy.
Found guilty in November 2023 of seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, the former crypto mogul says he did not “never intended to hurt anyone or take anyone’s money”. Admitting to “bad decisions”he has not “never thought what (he) was doing was illegal.” While Judge Lewis Kaplan considered that he had never had “a word of remorse for having committed terrible crimes”SBF affirms “Of course” to have some. “Haunted, every day, by what has been lost”the businessman takes the entire “responsibility for what happened to the company” : “When you’re in charge, it doesn’t matter why things go wrong.”
“Paid in full” customers?
“I would give anything to help repair even some of the damage. I’m doing what I can from prison, but it’s deeply frustrating not to be able to do more.”, also proclaims Sam Bankman-Fried. Who, having “given the despair, frustration and feeling of betrayal of thousands of customers”, ask that they be “paid in full, at the current price.” And this, despite the announcement by FTX liquidators: clients should recover their funds, but on the value of the cryptocurrency at the end of 2022. If the 32-year-old man or one of his employees had remained in his position as CEO, they would, according to him, have been “repaid a long time ago”.
#Sam #BankmanFried #boss #FTX #speaks #conviction