03/28/2024 – 17:21
Former cryptocurrency king Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced this Thursday (28) to 25 years in prison in the United States for fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, among other charges.
At the hearing at which his sentence was announced, in the southern court of New York, Judge Lewis Kaplan highlighted that the young man “never uttered a word of remorse for having committed a terrible crime”.
He stated, citing examples, that “SBF” – his initials – had committed at least three acts of perjury when testifying at his trial, as well as witness tampering.
The 32-year-old entrepreneur apologized, admitting he had “made a series of bad decisions.”
In November, a jury found him guilty of seven charges, including fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
In addition to the 25 years in prison, “SBF” was fined 11 billion dollars [R$ 55 bilhões, na cotação atual]which can be used to compensate for any losses incurred by clients, and will be on probation for three years, announced the Ministry of Justice.
The sentence is much lower than that requested by New York prosecutor Damian Williams, who demanded between 40 and 50 years in prison for the founder and president of the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX.
– Finance wizard –
Known by his initials, “SBF,” Bankmand-Field used the platform’s customer deposits without consent to make risky transactions at his hedge fund, Alameda Research, and to purchase luxury properties and make political donations.
“Committing fraud against your customers and investors has serious consequences”, commented, this Thursday, Merrick Garland, Secretary of Justice, quoted in a press release.
A billionaire since before the age of 30, Bankman-Fried conquered the world of cryptocurrencies at breakneck speed, transforming FTX, a small start-up of which he co-founded in 2019, into the second largest cryptocurrency transaction platform in the world.
But in November 2022, the FTX empire imploded, unable to cope with massive withdrawal requests from customers terrified to learn that part of their deposits with the company had been compromised in risky operations.
At the time of his declaration of bankruptcy, he was missing approximately 9 billion dollars (R$ 45 billion reais, at current prices).
The group's liquidators have already recovered around US$6.4 billion (R$32 billion) in cash and plan to fully reimburse harmed customers.
They benefit from the brutal appreciation of cryptos, which recovered after a catastrophic 2022, marked by several crashes and the FTX scandal.
Catapulted by the flow of capital and the launch of a new investment product, the undisputed leader of cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, has been breaking records since March.
Faced with the possibility of a long prison sentence, Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyers tried to portray him in a more human way, instead of the manipulative image that emerged throughout the trial.
“Those who know Sam know that he is selfless, selfless,” his defense wrote in a document presented to federal judge Lewis Kaplan before the hearing, along with dozens of letters of support from those close to him.
Those who know him “understand that his conduct was never motivated by greed or a thirst for prestige,” his lawyers added, citing witnesses to support their petition.
What is certain is that this former student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was never accused of personal enrichment and kept most of his fortune in FTX shares, whose value evaporated.
During the trial, which lasted five weeks, his lawyers presented him as a young businessman overworked and the victim of errors in judgment by his partners and employees.
To obtain leniency from the federal judge, they also mentioned that he suffered from an autism spectrum disorder, which, in their assessment, makes him “vulnerable among the prison population”.
Based on this, the defense proposed a sentence of just over five to six and a half years in prison.
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