Prosecution in Closing Remarks: Sam Bankman-Fried ‘Lied REPEATEDLY’ on the Stand – Built a ‘Pyramid of Deceit’ to Defraud Costumers – Jury Expected to Start Deliberations on Thursday
The high profile Sam Bankman-Fried fraud trial is nearing its completion with the closing arguments.
In their final say, prosecutors stated that the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul repeatedly lied on the witness stand.
Since SBF made the unusual decision to testify in his own criminal case, he is potentially risking a greater prison sentence in case he’s found guilty and if the judge agrees with prosecutors that he lied under oath.
And the sentencing guideline is brutal to begin with, may be as high as 110 years in prison.
Assistant US Attorney Nicholas Roos, delivered the prosecution’s closing arguments, and noted Bankman-Fried was more comfortable with his answers under questioning from his own attorney — but that he became far more hesitating and equivocal when prosecutors questioned him him.
Business Insider reported:
“‘Did you notice his testimony on Friday was smooth, like he rehearsed a lot?’ Roos told jurors in a downtown Manhattan courtroom.”
Roos recalled to the jury that, upon questioning by US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, Bankman-Fried said he ‘couldn’t recall’ the answers to questions more than 140 different times.
“‘He lied about big things and about little things’, Roos said. ‘He approached every question like up was down and down was up’. […] ‘This is not about complicated issues like cryptocurrency, about hedging, about investing’, he said. ‘It’s about deception, it’s about lies, it’s about stealing, it’s about greed’.”
Prosecutors flipped three members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle: Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nashad Singh.
The three pleaded guilty to co-conspiring with Bankman-Fried to defraud customers. They said ‘they knew’ they were doing something wrong using customer funds.
“Roos said that Bankman-Fried, after listening to their testimony in court, shaped his own testimony to tell a story that conveniently left him out of the loop during key moments. ‘You would have to ignore the testimony of his partners in crime’, Roos said.
[…] ‘The truth is there is just one person who had the motive to set up the secret system for Alameda to borrow unlimited amounts of FTX customer money’, Roos said.”
Bankman-Fried’s attorney will deliver his closing argument during Wednesday afternoon.
Reuters reported:
“‘This was a pyramid of deceit built by the defendant on a foundation of lies and false promises, all to get money’, prosecutor Nicolas Roos told the jury. ‘Eventually it collapsed, leaving thousands of victims in its wake’.”
Roos alerted the jury that ‘there is no question’ that billions of dollars of customer money paid off Alameda’s lenders, made speculative investments and donated to U.S. political candidates’.
The dispute in the case is over ‘what Bankman-Fried knew’ about where customer money went and whether it was wrong.
“He took the money’” Roos told the jurors. “He knew it was wrong. He did it anyway, because he thought he could walk his way out of it and talk his way out of it. And today, with you, that ends.”
[…] ‘The story the defendant told you was that he didn’t know what was going on and didn’t think what he was doing was wrong – and that was a lie’, Roos said.”
Under questioning by his own legal counsel, SBF was able to paint himself as a well-meaning, overworked businessperson. Every incriminating aspect of the relationship between FTX and Alameda had a logical business explanation.
Wired reported:
“This line of argument, says Daniel Richman, a former prosecutor and professor at Columbia Law School, was the ‘most viable route to take’ for the defense, whose options had been ‘substantially limited’ by the strength of cooperating witness testimony. But it was a Hail Mary nonetheless, in no small part because Bankman-Fried, in his parade of interviews prior to his arrest, had given the prosecution length upon length of rope with which to hang him. […] The decision for Bankman-Fried to take the stand was a high-risk play with significant potential downside.”
While he was reasonably successful in his testimony with his own lawyers, that didn’t last.
“Under cross-examination by the prosecution, however, a different Bankman-Fried was on show — a more evasive, forgetful version. To questions posed about the events that led up to the FTX collapse or public comments made in the wake, Bankman-Fried almost always said he could not remember, or was noncommittal in his response.
In one period of cross-examination, when asked whether he recalled making various representations about FTX’s risk management processes, Bankman-Fried replied to four consecutive questions with the same pre-canned phrase: ‘No. But I may have’. Another favorite: ‘That’s not quite how I would put it’. In most instances, the prosecution was able to confront Bankman-Fried with exhibits — message logs, FTX documentation, interview excerpts, podcast appearances, and such—to help clarify his memory. The pattern continued.”
Judge Lewis Kaplan chastised the crypto bro on multiple occasions for not answering the question posed.
Joshua Naftalis, former prosecutor: “‘The problem is, he didn’t come out clean, says Naftalis: The government was able to land ’blow after blow after blow’ in an ‘almost mechanical exercise’ designed both to imply Bankman-Fried is untrustworthy and cast itself as ‘an honest broker of the facts’‘.”
The disgraced former billionaire was bound to have a hard time on the stand, because he had ‘backed himself into a corner’ long before the trial began.
“Around the time of his arrest last December, he took a multitude of media interviews. He appeared on podcasts. He tweeted incessantly. He started his own Substack. He submitted written testimony to Congress. Much of it reappeared at trial in the form of government exhibits. The volume of public statements available to the prosecution in this particular case, says Tuchmann, is ‘something close to unique’.”
The Jury is expected to start deliberations on Thursday (2).
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