US court sentence crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison

A United States entrepreneur and crypto king, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison over his involvement in defrauding users of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

Justice Lewis Kaplan of a US District court in lower Manhattan, called the defence argument misleading, logically flawed, and speculative.

Kaplan said Bankman-Fried had obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses in mounting his defense — something Kaplan said he weighed in his sentencing decision.

After a two-hour hearing, Justice Lewis Kaplan said Bankman-Fried knew what he was doing was criminal and regretted making a bad bet about the likelihood of being caught.

Bankman-Fried, wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, struck an apologetic tone, saying he had made a series of “selfish” decisions while leading FTX and “threw it all away.”

“It haunts me every day,” he said in a statement. “There are a lot of mistakes that I made.”

Bankman-Fried, however, told the court that FTX had the ability to repay customers when it collapsed.

The prosecutors said Bankman-Fried took more than $10bn (£7.9bn) from unsuspecting customers in “one of the biggest financial frauds” in US history.

FTX was valued at $32bn before it went bankrupt in 2022 and SBF crafted a public image that drew in celebrities, politicians and business titans.

Prosecutors had sought as much as 50 years, while Bankman-Fried’s legal team argued for no more than six and a half years.

He was convicted on seven criminal counts in November and has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since.