Public prosecutor asked for 50 years in prison. Judge understands that it has been proven that Bankman-Fried used billions of dollars from FTX clients to avoid the bankruptcy of a fund he also led
Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. The Manhattan court found, this Thursday, that the former CEO of FTX defrauded customers and investors of the now bankrupt cryptocurrency company.
Before announcing the sentence, Judge Lewis Kaplan said there was a risk “that Bankman-Fried could be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and that this was not a trivial risk.”
Kaplan agreed with the prosecutor’s charge that Bankman-Fried “wanted to be a very, very politically influential person in the country [Estados Unidos]”, and that this fueled the former CEO’s financial crimes.
Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence was about half what prosecutors had asked for, but still puts him at the upper end of sentence lengths in prominent white-collar fraud cases. At his head is Bernard Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison for the Ponzi scheme he leads and which earned him 20 billion dollars. Madoff died about 12 years after he was convicted. Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of four counts of defrauding investors while running the bankrupt blood testing company Theranos, was sentenced to just over 11 years.
In addition to the prison sentence, the Manhattan court also ordered the confiscation of more than 11 billion dollars.
Adding that in this case there will be no refund of funds because it would be “impractical”, given the high number of victims.
Judge Lewis Kaplan also said he would recommend to the US prison system that Bankman-Fried be placed in a medium-security prison or any lower-security prison that decision-makers deem appropriate. The judge further recommended that the prison should be as close to the San Francisco area as possible so that Bankman-Fried’s family can visit him.
