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Sam Bankman-Fried is an “awkward high-school math nerd” unfairly depicted by the government as “some sort of monster”, his lawyers argued in their final pitch to convince jurors to acquit the former cryptocurrency mogul on trial in New York.
Addressing the 12-person jury on Wednesday afternoon, Mark Cohen acknowledged his client may have made “bad business judgments” in the run-up to the implosion of his FTX exchange, which collapsed last November with an $8bn hole in its balance sheet. But he argued those were “not a crime”.
Earlier prosecutors in their closing remarks accused the 31-year-old Bankman-Fried of building a “pyramid of deceit” that masked a scheme to steal billions of dollars from customers of FTX.
Pointing theatrically to the defendant, assistant US attorney Nick Roos said, “this man, Samuel Bankman-Fried” was ultimately responsible for raiding FTX depositors’ accounts to make a series of risky bets, repay loans and buy real estate.
“He spent customers’ money and he lied about it,” Roos added, maintaining that Bankman-Fried and his company claimed to be the “safest and easiest way to buy cryptocurrencies” in advertising campaigns featuring celebrities such as comedian Larry David and football star Tom Brady.
The closing arguments from both sides sought to contextualise the five weeks of testimony presented to the jury, some of which shone a light on the inner workings of FTX and its affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to charges including fraud and money laundering, and could face decades in prison if convicted.
The jury heard from former executives at the exchange and Alameda, including co-operating witnesses Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh. They pointed the finger at Bankman-Fried, alleging that he had instructed them to allow up to $65bn of FTX customer funds to be secretly raided.
But Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, contended that the prosecution’s case was based on the “false premise” that FTX was a fraud from the get-go, when in fact “the government did not establish that Sam knew about [the size of the hole in FTX’s balance sheet] until the fall of 2022, because he didn’t”. He said the government had deliberately focused on his hair, clothes and sex life in order to paint him as a movie villain.
In his closing remarks, Roos sought to rubbish claims made by Bankman-Fried on the stand earlier in the trial, suggesting that complex trading strategies made it impossible for any one person to be fully abreast of FTX and Alameda’s risk management.
“This is not about complicated issues of cryptocurrency, not about hedging . . . it’s about lies, it’s about stealing, it’s about greed,” he told the court. “He took the money, he knew it was wrong, and he did it anyway.”
Bankman-Fried, he claimed, “thought he could talk his way out of this”, emphasising that the former billionaire “didn’t have to testify in this trial” but “told a story [and] lied to you”.
Roos said that while the defendant was fluent when questioned by his own lawyer, “he was a different person” on cross-examination and “couldn’t remember a single detail” about the alleged scheme, claiming some 140 times that he could not recall specifics.
“He approached every question like up was down and down was up,” Roos added.
The prosecutor pointed to evidence presented during the government’s case, including “secret spreadsheets” prepared by Ellison with alternative balance sheets to be provided to investors that disguised the extent of use of FTX customer funds, and the establishment of a line of credit for Alameda that allowed it to do “unlimited stealing”.
Roos further argued that in order to believe Bankman-Fried’s version of events — that he was running two successful businesses but was blindsided by a downturn in the crypto markets and a smear campaign by competitor Binance — “you would have to believe that the defendant . . . who graduated from [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] . . . was actually clueless”.
Ellison, Wang and Singh, all of whom have pleaded guilty to fraud, contradicted Bankman-Fried’s narrative, Roos said, reminding the jury that “if you believe even one of these witnesses is telling the truth . . . the defendant is guilty”.
The jury will begin deliberations after both sides have finished their closing statements.
