Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyer has urged a judge to impose a lenient sentence on the founder of FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, for stealing $8 billion from customers.
In a sentencing submission, Marc Mukasey argued that clients would get most of their funds back. He told Judge Lewis Kaplan that between five and a quarter and six and a half years would be an appropriate prison term.
That is far less than the maximum sentence of 110 years that Bankman-Fried, 31, faces after being found guilty at a federal court in Manhattan in November of seven charges of fraud and conspiracy, in what prosecutors have called one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.
Bankman-Fried had denied the charges and is expected to appeal against his conviction and sentence. He has acknowledged making mistakes in running FTX, but claimed at the trial that he had never intended to steal customers’ funds.
Kaplan is due to sentence Bankman-Fried on March 28.
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The lawyer’s submission was accompanied by letters of support from Bankman-Fried’s parents, a psychiatrist and others. His parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, the Stanford law professors, said their son was uninterested in material wealth and had worked hard to redress customers’ losses in the month between FTX, which was based in the Bahamas, collapsing in November 2022 and his arrest on fraud charges.
“Barbara and I … witnessed first-hand his single-minded focus on getting money back to depositors, long after there was any possibility he would be able to save any of his equity or wealth,” Bankman wrote.
Mukasey called the 100-year sentence recommended by probation officers “barbaric”, saying it was based partly on a faulty assertion that FTX’s customers had lost billions of dollars. He pointed to the bankrupt company’s recent statement that it expected to repay all customers in full to back up the argument that Bankman-Fried had not set out to steal.
“The conviction does not address whether Sam intended to pay the money back. He did,” Mukasey wrote.
The probation officers’ calculation is not binding on Kaplan. The US attorney’s office in Manhattan is expected to make its own sentencing recommendation by March 15.
