By Luc Cohen
(Reuters) – The jury that convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of stealing billions of dollars from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange saw only “half the picture” because the judge did not allow critical evidence, his lawyer argued in their appeal on Friday .
In a 102-page brief filed with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Bankman-Fried’s attorney wrote that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan erred in preventing the 32-year-old former billionaire from presenting evidence to support his belief that FTX had enough. money to cover customer withdrawals.
“The government thus presented a false narrative that FTX’s customers, lenders, and investors had permanently lost their money,” attorney Alexandra Shapiro wrote, urging the appeals court to uphold Bankman-Fried’s conviction and 25 prison sentence years to be undone. “The jury was only allowed to see half of the photo.”
A representative for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, which filed the charges, declined to comment.
Criminal defendants face a high bar in overturning their convictions, as they must prove that judges made errors significant enough to have affected the verdict.
FTX declared bankruptcy in November 2022 after a wave of customer withdrawals, marking a rapid fall from grace for Bankman-Fried, who had built a reputation as an honest broker in the rough cryptocurrency industry and gained fame through lavish philanthropic and political donations .
FTX has said its customers will receive 100% recovery on their claims against the company, based on the value of their accounts at the time it filed for bankruptcy. Cryptocurrency prices were lower then than they are today, which left some customers feeling shortchanged.
In criminal charges filed in December 2022, prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of stealing $8 billion in client funds to plug losses at Alameda Research, his crypto-focused hedge fund.
At his trial in late 2023, Bankman-Fried admitted to making mistakes in running FTX, but testified he never stole money. He placed much of the blame on other FTX executives.
Jurors didn’t believe his explanation and convicted him of two counts of fraud and five counts of conspiracy that he faced. At Bankman-Fried’s sentencing in March, Kaplan said Bankman-Fried knew his actions were wrong but that he “made a very bad guess about the likelihood of getting caught.”
Bankman-Fried is currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
