By Seun Opejobi
A United States entrepreneur and crypto king, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison over his involvement in defrauding users of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Justice Lewis Kaplan of a US District court in lower Manhattan, called the defence argument misleading, logically flawed, and speculative.
Kaplan said Bankman-Fried had obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses in mounting his defense — something Kaplan said he weighed in his sentencing decision.
After a two-hour hearing, Justice Lewis Kaplan said Bankman-Fried knew what he was doing was criminal and regretted making a bad bet about the likelihood of being caught.
Bankman-Fried, wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, struck an apologetic tone, saying he had made a series of “selfish” decisions while leading FTX and “threw it all away.”
“It haunts me every day,” he said in a statement. “There are a lot of mistakes that I made.”
Bankman-Fried, however, told the court that FTX had the ability to repay customers when it collapsed.
The prosecutors said Bankman-Fried took more than $10bn (£7.9bn) from unsuspecting customers in “one of the biggest financial frauds” in US history.
FTX was valued at $32bn before it went bankrupt in 2022 and SBF crafted a public image that drew in celebrities, politicians and business titans.
Prosecutors had sought as much as 50 years, while Bankman-Fried’s legal team argued for no more than six and a half years.
He was convicted on seven criminal counts in November and has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since.
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