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Caroline Ellison, the previous boss of the buying and selling agency by means of which FTX gambled billions of {dollars} in buyer funds, has been sentenced to 2 years in jail, regardless of aiding prosecutors within the felony case in opposition to Sam Bankman-Fried, the collapsed cryptocurrency trade’s founder.
Choose Lewis Kaplan imposed the sentence throughout a listening to in a New York federal courtroom on Tuesday. “To all of the victims and everybody I harmed . . . I’m so so sorry,” a tearful Ellison informed the courtroom forward of Kaplan’s determination. “I’m deeply ashamed.”
The penalty for Ellison, who ran FTX-affiliated buying and selling fund Alameda Analysis, contrasts sharply with the 25-year prison sentence handed to Bankman-Fried in March, which is among the many longest US sentences ever for a white-collar felony. One other former FTX government, Ryan Salame, acquired a 90-month sentence in Might.
FTX was one of many world’s greatest crypto exchanges when it collapsed in November 2022 following revelations that Alameda had secretly siphoned billions of {dollars} in buyer deposits.
Ellison, who shortly pleaded responsible to fraud and cash laundering fees quickly after FTX’s implosion, testified for a number of days at Bankman-Fried’s trial, by which she was the star witness.
She walked the jury by means of spreadsheets, inside paperwork and personal Sign chats that painted an image of a years-long felony conspiracy by the one-time crypto billionaire.
Whereas on the stand, Ellison revealed the FTX founder had directed her and her ex-colleagues to steal roughly $10bn of buyer deposits from the trade to fund dangerous investments and repay loans.
She mentioned Bankman-Fried had directed her to create seven “various” stability sheets for Alameda, a few of which disguised billions of {dollars} of kickbacks to FTX executives, and was ordered to cowl up how the buying and selling group was “borrowing $10bn from FTX clients”.
A model of Alameda’s accounts that made its “belongings look bigger” was supplied to crypto lenders, together with Genesis, which was calling in loans amid a pointy downturn within the sector, Ellison testified. Genesis’s lending unit later went bankrupt.
Prosecutors had urged leniency for Ellison, 29. In a letter to Kaplan forward of the listening to, they highlighted how Ellison “was essential to the federal government’s profitable prosecution of Samuel Bankman-Fried for one of many largest monetary frauds in historical past”, and supplied “substantial help within the investigation”.
They added that Ellison, who was previously in an “on-again, off-again” romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried, was humiliated within the press because of her testimony and had her non-public conversations with a therapist divulged in Michael Lewis’s e book on the FTX collapse.
“The federal government can not consider one other co-operating witness in current historical past who has acquired a higher stage of consideration and harassment,” they wrote.
A graduate of Stanford College, Ellison met Bankman-Fried at high-speed buying and selling firm Jane Avenue, earlier than leaving to hitch Alameda with him. She was answerable for working the buying and selling agency and had described feeling trapped and pulled into Bankman-Fried’s warped ethical worldview.
Whereas awaiting sentencing, Ellison has written a novella “set in Edwardian England and loosely primarily based on her sister Kate’s imagined amorous exploits”, the previous government’s mom revealed in a letter to the courtroom.
Two different former senior FTX executives who additionally pleaded responsible, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, are set to be sentenced later this yr.
