Sam Bankman-Fried should avoid a trial and cut a deal, according to a former Watergate prosecutor. Nick Akerman told Yahoo Finance that an acquittal at a trial is “virtually impossible.” “If I were his lawyer I would advise him to cut his losses, take a plea, and make the best possible deal he could,” he said. Loading Something is loading.
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Sam Bankman-Fried should avoid a trial and push for a plea deal, because the FTX founder has almost no chance of getting acquitted by a jury in a trial, according to former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance on Thursday, he pointed to the fact that former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang have already agreed to plea deals and are cooperating with prosecutors.
“It’s gonna be very tough, if not impossible, for him to go to trial on these charges,” said Ackerman, who also previously served as an assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York. “It seems to me when you have two insiders that were that close to him basically laying out the scheme, it is almost virtually impossible to ever think that he could be acquitted by a jury.”
Bankman-Fried was arrested earlier this month in the Bahamas and has been extradited to the US, where he faces federal charges of defrauding investors. He was released on $250 million bail on Thursday and will stay with his parents in Palo Alto, California.
Ackerman said Bankman-Fried could help his case and get a lesser sentence by going before the court to show some remorse and take some responsibility for the FTX debacle.
“If I were his lawyer I would advise him to cut his losses, take a plea, and make the best possible deal he could,” he said.
FTX collapsed as it faced a shortfall of billions of dollars between its liabilities and assets amid reports that FTX transferred client funds to Alameda.
Bankman-Fried has claimed he wasn’t aware of what was going on and didn’t “knowingly commingle funds” between Alameda and FTX, but the SEC’s complaint states that he often directed Ellison to manipulate or misstate the financial position of the trading firm.
While crypto is a relatively new asset class, Ackerman suggested the case is straight forward under existing law. He said the collapse of FTX is essentially an “old traditional fraud” that involved misleading people, taking their money, and moving it around “like it was one big slush fund.”
“There is nothing unusual about this fraud,” he added. “This is a pretty classic fraud that is perpetrated and has been perpetrated for years. And the fact that it’s a new asset class really doesn’t make a bit of difference.”