Disgraced former FTX CEO and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team has claimed that customers have lost “zero” dollars despite an estimated $11 billion in customer and investors losses due to SBF’s fraud.
Judge Lewis Kaplan on Friday sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in jail after he was convicted of five counts of conspiracy and two counts of wire fraud related to the collapse of the digital currency exchange FTX.
In Bankman-Fried’s sentencing memo, his lawyers claimed that the “most reasonable estimate of customer loss is zero” and that FTX was “solvent at the time of the bankruptcy petition,” and merely had a “liquidity shortfall.”
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried speaks during the Institute of International Finance (IIF) annual membership meeting in Washington, DC, on Oct. 13, 2022. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“The money was there — not lost,” the lawyers claimed.
Prosecutors claimed that the FTX customer loss amounted to $8 billion. When including investor and lenders’ losses for FTX and Alameda Research, FTX’s sister company and a hedge fund, the total eclipses $11 billion.
Current FTX CEO John Ray said in a scathing letter to Kaplan that Bankman-Fried made “demonstrably false” claims in his sentencing memo.
Breitbart News’s Lucas Nolan reported:
The letter also refutes Bankman-Fried’s claim that FTX is “solvent and safe,” with Ray pointing out that vast sums of money were stolen by the disgraced founder and converted into various assets, including Bahamas real estate, cryptocurrencies, and speculative ventures. Ray highlights that while some assets have been recovered through the efforts of dedicated professionals, many have not, such as bribes to Chinese officials and investments for which Bankman-Fried grossly overpaid. The CEO states that the harm was “vast” and that Bankman-Fried’s remorse is “nonexistent.”
According to Ray, Bankman-Fried falsely claimed that FTX customers should “get back all their money” and that he could help recover more value than the team behind the Chapter 11 bankruptcy petitions. However, Ray argues that these petitions were necessary to stop the damage caused by Bankman-Fried’s crimes and that the recovery rates would have been substantially lower without them. The CEO also notes that some victims are “extremely unhappy” about stolen bitcoins, as prices have recently reached all-time highs, and they believe they should receive something closer to today’s value.
“…When I took over as CEO, there were only 105 bitcoins left on the FTX.com exchange, against customer entitlements of nearly 100,000 bitcoins,” Ray explained.
“Mr. Bankman-Fried’s victims will never be returned to the same economic position they would have been in today absent his colossal fraud,” Ray wrote.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.