Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire continues to collapse. Accused of fraud, criminal conspiracy and money laundering, the ex-billionaire was found guilty of seven counts on Thursday, November 2, by a jury in New York, after five weeks of a trial resounding.
The fallen cryptocurrency star faces up to 110 years in prison in total. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan set Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing announcement for March 28, 2024.
The prosecution accuses him of having used, without their knowledge, funds deposited by customers of his cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX, which went bankrupt in November 2022. The money fueled transactions and investments at risk of his investment company, Alameda Research, whose borrowings from the platform reached up to around $14 billion (€13 billion).
“Find him guilty,” Danielle Sassoon, representative of Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams, said in the morning. She described him as a “talented” boss, “ambitious”, who “amazed” the public, the press and even the elected representatives of Congress, who auditioned him three times. “This is someone who wanted to become president of the United States,” she recalled.
Consumed by his appetite for grandeur, he wanted to make FTX the first global cryptocurrency exchange platform, according to her. In his race, “he wanted to spend billions taken from his clients’ accounts to gain power and relationships,” said the deputy prosecutor. “He had the arrogance to think he could commit fraud and get away with it. »
He pleaded good faith
“SBF”, aged 31, had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. He admitted, at the hearing, to “big mistakes”, but always denied knowingly breaking the law. His lawyer portrayed him as a young entrepreneur lacking experience, who had acted in good faith.
To exonerate the accused, “you would have to believe that he understood nothing” about what was happening within his own companies, another deputy prosecutor told the jury at the hearing, Nicolas Roos. “You’ve been watching this whole trial and you know none of this is true,” he added.
“Now it’s up to you to decide who to believe,” Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan told the twelve jurors before they retired to deliberate on Thursday. It only took them a few hours to deliver an unsurprising verdict.
In just a few months, Sam Bankman-Fried, a physics graduate from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had turned a small start-up, launched in 2019, into the second largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the world. But the affair began a year ago, when the media CoinDesk revealed that a considerable part of Alameda’s assets consisted of a cryptocurrency created by FTX, FTT. The revelation caused the collapse of this digital currency, and the beginning of the Stations of the Cross for Sam Bankman-Fried. Extradited from the Bahamas, where FTX’s headquarters were located, the thirty-year-old, whose fortune had evaporated, was indicted in mid-December 2022.
