FTX CEO John Ray III has written a damning victim impact report on co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, ahead of his conviction. According to John Ray, the mess Sam Bankman-Fried left behind at FTX is so enormous that it is impossible to fully compensate the creditors (the platform’s old users).
According to Ray, “victims have suffered and continue to suffer.” For that reason, he does not understand the request of SBF’s lawyers to reduce his sentence from 40-50 to 6.5 years.
John Ray calls Bankman-Fried claims “false”
John Ray’s letter follows arguments from Bankman-Fried’s lawyers on March 19 that the US Attorney’s Office’s 40- to 50-year sentence was too harsh.
Ray argued that Bankman-Fried’s claims that FTX was financially sound at the time of bankruptcy and that no money had been lost were “categorical, callous and demonstrably false.”
“Customers will never be in the same position again if they had not encountered Bankman-Fried and his so-called ‘altruism’.”
Ray stated that he led a large team that spent more than a year “cleaning up a metaphorical mess” to a company that is moving toward a plan “that will deliver substantial value to creditors.”
“Mr. Bankman-Fried’s victims will never return to the same economic position they would have been in today without his massive fraud,” he added elsewhere in the letter.
Ray took over FTX in November 2022 and described the extensive work done by an army of lawyers to recover assets, cooperate with investigations and position the company, which now plans to return all value to creditors.
Impact of the crimes
However, this recovery does not detract from the immense damage caused by Bankman-Fried’s crimes, Ray said.
He stated that when he took over as CEO, there were only 105 Bitcoin left on FTX, compared to the nearly 100,000 BTC that customers would be entitled to under the system.
“Why were Bitcoin missing?” he wondered before stating that a jury “concluded beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Bankman-Fried stole them and converted them into other things.”
Missing out on that Bitcoin has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the 2021 bull market as well. After all, Sam Bankman-Fried and his team sold these 100,000 Bitcoin for other junk. If that money had “just” stayed in Bitcoin, 2021 might have looked very different.
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Source: https://newsbit.nl/ftx-ceo-slachtoffers-sbf-zullen-hun-geld-nooit-helemaal-terugkrijgen/
