03/28/2024 – 15:16
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency tycoon, was sentenced this Thursday (29), in the United States, to 25 years in prison, months after being convicted on charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
At the hearing in which the sentence was announced in the southern court of New York, the 32-year-old businessman apologized and admitted that he made a “series of poor decisions”.
The sentence is much lower than that requested by New York prosecutor Damian Williams, who wanted between 40 and 50 years in prison for the founder and president of cryptocurrency trading platform FTX.
In November, a Manhattan jury found him guilty of seven charges, including fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
Known as “SBF”, the businessman used, without consent, the deposits of the platform's customers to carry out high-risk transactions in his “hedge fund”, Alameda Research, and to buy luxury properties, in addition to making political donations.
A billionaire before he was 30, Bankman-Fried took the cryptocurrency world by storm with breakneck speed, transforming FTX, a small start-up he co-founded in 2019, into the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange platform.
However, in November 2022, the FTX empire imploded, unable to cope with massive withdrawal requests from terrified customers after they learned that part of the funds deposited with the company were committed to risky operations.
At the time of its declaration of bankruptcy, approximately 9 billion dollars were missing (R$ 44.8 billion, at current prices).
The group's liquidators have already recovered around US$6.4 billion (R$32 billion) and plan a full refund to affected customers.
They benefit from the brutal appreciation of cryptocurrencies, 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 the end of February.
– “pernicious megalomania” –
Faced with the possibility of a long prison sentence, Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyers tried to portray a more human “SBF”, instead of the manipulative image that emerged throughout the trial.
“Those who know Sam know that he is selfless, selfless,” his supporters wrote in a document presented to U.S. District 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 when citing testimonies 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 overwhelmed by his workload and the victim of errors in judgment by his partners and employees.
To obtain leniency from the federal magistrate, the defenders also mentioned that their client had autism spectrum disorder, which, in their opinion, makes him “vulnerable within the prison population”.
Based on these elements, the defense proposed a sentence of just over five to six and a half years in prison.
Since being convicted, Sam Bankman-Fried has changed his legal team and hired the services of Marc Mukasey, much more extroverted and confrontational than the discreet Mark Cohen, his previous lawyer.
“In every aspect of his activity, and for each of the crimes committed, the defendant showed an open lack of respect for the law,” Williams's prosecutorial team insisted.
In the process, “SBF’s” defense was weak given the testimonies of three former directors of FTX and Alameda, including his ex-girlfriend, who provided detailed evidence of the accused’s main role in the fraud.
“He understood the rules, but decided that they did not apply to him”, insisted the Prosecutor in a document sent to the judge that mentions a “pernicious megalomania” and a “superiority complex”.
#cryptocurrency #tycoon #sentenced #years #prison