Sam Bankman-Fried will learn his sentence Thursday, four months after he was found guilty of orchestrating the multibillion-dollar fraud that prompted the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. <\/p>\n
A federal jury in New York City convicted Bankman-Fried, 32, in November on each of the two counts of fraud and five counts of conspiracy he faced. He has been jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center facility in Brooklyn ever since, with his bail having been revoked over witness-tampering allegations.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors are seeking as much as 50 years of the statutory 110-year sentence implied by the conviction. Bankman-Fried apparently lacks a criminal history, and prosecutors rarely seek the statutory maximum, said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia University Law School specializing in white-collar criminal defense. <\/p>\n
But the nature of the fraud, Bankman-Fried\u2019s comfortable upbringing and the scale of losses to victims led prosecutors to nevertheless seek an aggressive sentence.<\/p>\n
\u2018In every part of his business, and with respect to each crime committed, the defendant demonstrated a brazen disrespect for the rule of law,\u2019 the prosecutors wrote. \u2018He understood the rules, but decided they did not apply to him. He knew what society deemed illegal and unethical, but disregarded that based on a pernicious megalomania guided by the defendant\u2019s own values and sense of superiority.\u2019<\/p>\n
The prosecutors said Bankman-Fried \u2018knew his customers\u2019 expectations \u2014 that he would hold their money safe \u2014 but he disregarded them based on a callous belief that he could put their money to better use.<\/p>\n
Bankman-Fried\u2019s defense team is asking for 6\u00bd years or less. In a 98-page filing pleading for leniency, they cited Bankman-Fried\u2019s mental health struggles, his purported selflessness in his personal life and the safety risks he faces in prison. <\/p>\n
They also argued FTX victims did not end up suffering losses \u2014 a notion against which the exchange\u2019s current overseer, John Ray, has pushed back.<\/p>\n
\u2018There are plenty of things we did not get back, like the bribes to Chinese officials or the hundreds of millions of dollars he spent to buy access to or time with celebrities or politicians or investments for which he grossly overpaid having done zero diligence,\u2019 Ray wrote in a March 20 memo. \u2018The harm was vast. The remorse is nonexistent.\u2019<\/p>\n
While the price of bitcoin has begun to surge again, FTX victims are entitled to recover crypto assets only at the prices observed when the exchange filed for bankruptcy. <\/p>\n
Bankman-Fried\u2019s consistent lack of remorse throughout the trial is likely to weigh on the sentence U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan hands down, Coffee said.<\/p>\n
Bankman-Fried has \u2018held to the line that he sympathizes with the victims and wants to help them get their money back. That\u2019s not going to work,\u2019 Coffee said. \u2018He\u2019s got to find a way to walk a careful line, without abandoning his appeal, to express some contrition. Otherwise the judge is going to say: \u2018This guy\u2019s just sticking it to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
A separate Bureau of Prisons official will decide where Bankman-Fried ends up serving his sentence. Federal cases do not allow the possibility of parole, but Coffee said Bankman-Fried may end up having some years shaved off his term for good behavior.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s unlikely to add up to much of a reduction, Coffee said. <\/p>\n
\u2018He\u2019s facing real time,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Sam Bankman-Fried will learn his sentence Thursday, four months after he was found guilty of orchestrating the multibillion-dollar fraud that prompted the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. A federal jury in New York City convicted Bankman-Fried, 32, in November on each of the two counts of fraud and five counts of conspiracy he faced. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2528,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}