Caroline Ellison, former partner and girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, who pleaded guilty and testified in the FTX bankruptcy case, was sentenced Tuesday, September 24, to two years in prison for her role there, the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office announced to Agence France-Presse.
The former chief executive of Alameda Research, the hedge fund at the center of the case, was theoretically facing a total of 110 years in prison after pleading guilty to seven charges, including fraud.
While his defense demanded that he escape any prison sentence, the Manhattan prosecutor’s office simply suggested to Judge Lewis Kaplan that he take his cooperation into account. “copy”without demanding a specific sanction. Caroline Ellison had been a key prosecution witness in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, sentenced in March to twenty-five years in prison for one of the worst financial frauds in recent history. “SBF”, who is serving a prison sentence, appealed.
$9 billion is missing
Sam Bankman-Fried, a billionaire before he was 30 and now 32, had become a figure symbolizing the rise of cryptocurrencies, of which he had become an ambassador. In just a few months, he had turned his small startup FTX, launched in 2019, into the second largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world. But the case revealed that “SBF” had used, without their consent, the assets of clients of his digital currency exchange platform to carry out risky transactions through its sister company Alameda, in order to buy real estate or make political donations.
FTX imploded in November 2022. At the time of filing for bankruptcy, around $9 billion (€8 billion) was missing. At trial, Caroline Ellison described the defendant as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice, able to draw on his clients’ funds without hesitation to fuel his risky projects. Sam Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, tried to blame his ex-girlfriend and business partner, describing her as a poor manager.
