Cryptocurrencies: Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on all counts

Open in full screen mode

Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, leaves court in New York on February 16, 2023.

Agence France-Presse

Accused of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all counts Thursday by a jury in New York, after five weeks on trial. a resounding trial.

SBF, the fallen star of cryptocurrencies, faces up to 110 years in prison in total. His sentence must be pronounced later.

The jury accuses him of having used, without their knowledge, the funds deposited by the clients of his platform cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which went bankrupt in November 2022.

The money fueled venture trading and investments by his investment firm, Alameda Research, whose borrowings on the platform reached up to about $14 billion.

Judge him guilty, Danielle Sassoon, representing Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams, said in the morning.

She described him as an ambitious man who amazed the public, the press and even elected officials in Congress, who auditioned him three times.

He was someone who wanted to become president of the United States, she recalled.

Devoured through 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.

SBF admitted to #x27;hearing big mistakes, but he always denied knowingly breaking the law.

His lawyer portrayed him as a young entrepreneur lacking experience, who had acted in good faith.

To exonerate him “accused, you would have to believe that he had understood nothing of what was happening within his own companies,” another deputy prosecutor, Nicolas, told the jury at the hearing. Roos.

You've been watching this entire trial and you know none of this is true […] now it's up to you to decide who to believe, federal judge Lewis Kaplan told the 12 jurors, before they retired to deliberate around 7:15 p.m. Thursday.

Within hours, they delivered an unsurprising verdict.

The SBF affair began a year ago, when the media CoinDesk revealed that one part A considerable portion of Alameda's assets consisted of a cryptocurrency created by FTX, FTT.

The revelation had provoked the collapse of this digital currency and the SBF empire with it.

Extradited from the Bahamas, where FTX's headquarters were located, the young thirty-year-old (now 31 years old), whose fortune has evaporated, was charged in mid-December, notably with fraud and criminal conspiracy.