Within the sentencing submission, prosecutors included a number of pages of buyer messages despatched to Mr. Bankman-Fried on X, previously Twitter, on the time of FTX’s collapse. In lots of the posts, prospects expressed anger at not gaining access to their accounts.
Marc Mukasey, the lawyer Mr. Bankman-Fried employed to organize for the sentencing, argued in his authorized submitting that the 100-year sentence beneficial by the probation division could be paying homage to the 150 years given to Bernard Madoff, who pleaded responsible in 2009 to operating one of many largest Ponzi schemes in historical past. Any comparisons between the 2 males are inappropriate, Mr. Mukasey stated, given “the length and {dollars}” concerned in Mr. Madoff’s crimes — a 20-year-long fraud that generated $64 billion in paper losses.
The probation division’s advice was “barbaric” and “grotesque,” he stated.
Mr. Mukasey additionally identified that it took a court-appointed trustee greater than 15 years to return roughly $14 billion to Mr. Madoff’s buyers. Against this, the chapter legal professionals overseeing FTX’s unwinding have instructed that prospects of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s failed change are more likely to get again all of their cash on a comparatively quick timeline.
Prosecutors stated of their submitting that even when prospects of FTX bought most of their a refund, they’d have needed to look forward to greater than two years for that to occur. Prosecutors stated that “is of little consolation for these victims who wanted the cash in November 2022.”
Within the submitting, prosecutors requested Choose Kaplan to additionally order Mr. Bankman-Fried to forfeit greater than $10 billion, which represents the losses and stolen cash from his crime. Given the tens of millions of potential victims and the complexity of calculating losses, prosecutors stated any cash turned over by Mr. Bankman-Fried would finest be distributed within the FTX chapter.