As was expected, on Friday, the second biggest Democrat donor and disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried officially appealed his conviction on what prosecutors described as ‘one of the biggest financial frauds in American history’.
His legal team is arguing that the jury that convicted him of stealing billions of dollars from customers of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange only saw “half the picture”.
That would have happened because the ‘unfair’ judge did not allow in critical evidence.
In the brief filed with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer wrote that US District Judge Lewis Kaplan was mistaken in preventing him from introducing evidence that would have supported his argument that FTX had enough funds to cover customer withdrawals.
New York Post reported:
“’The government thus presented a false narrative that FTX’s customers, lenders, and investors had permanently lost their money’, lawyer Alexandra Shapiro wrote in urging the appeals court to overturn Bankman-Fried’s conviction and 25-year prison sentence. ‘The jury was only allowed to see half the picture’.”
FTX has since said that its customers will receive ‘100% recovery’ on their claims against the company, but that is ‘based on the value of their accounts at the time it filed for bankruptcy’.
The catch is: cryptocurrency prices were lower then than they are now, thus leaving some customers feeling short-changed.
“In criminal charges brought in December 2022, prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of stealing $8 billion in customer funds to plug losses at Alameda Research, his crypto-focused hedge fund.
At his late 2023 trial, Bankman-Fried admitted to making mistakes running FTX but testified that he never stole funds.”
The New York jury convicted Bankman-Fried of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, and U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison for his crimes.
Bankman-Fried is now requesting a new trial, accusing the judge overseeing his case of being unfairly biased against him.
CoinDesk reported:
“Bankman-Fried’s lawyers argued Judge Kaplan was unfair to the FTX founder throughout the trial, making ‘biting comments undermining the defense’ and ‘deriding’ his testimony in front of the jury.
‘Sam Bankman-Fried was never presumed innocent’, his lawyer, Alexandra Shapiro wrote in the filing. ‘He was presumed guilty by the judge who presided over his trial’. Shapiro took over from Bankman-Fried’s trial lawyers, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell, after his conviction.”
The appeal filing points to the judge’s blocking of certain defense arguments, as well as testimony about Bankman-Fried’s well-performing investments (such as Anthropic).
They also say he was ‘erroneously deprived of Brady material’ – exculpatory, if deliberately withheld, could result in the case being thrown out.
“Several of Bankman-Fried’s closest friends and colleagues – including his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, Gary Wang, and Ryan Salame – testified against him during his trial, and pleaded guilty to their own counts of fraud. Salame was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison in May. Ellison is set to be sentenced later this month, and has asked for no jail time.”
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