Sam Bankman-Fried has has been on trial on fraud and money laundering charges for just over four weeks, and the case appears to be finally coming to an end. The prosecution began its closing statements on Wednesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos stood before the jury from 10 a.m. Eastern Time until the court broke for lunch around 1 p.m., reiterating the prosecution’s case: Bankman-Fried lied, made false statements promises and is responsible for billions of dollars lost by thousands of investors in FTX. And on top of that, Bankman-Fried had plenty of opportunities to come clean, but he didn’t.
In a particularly dramatic moment, Roos pointed at the accused and said: “Who is responsible? This man: Samuel Bankman-Fried.” The former CEO of FTX did not look back, but bowed his head slightly.
The prosecutor emphasized that FTX was wrong to use customers’ funds without their knowledge or approval. “It was a universal view: Client funds belong to clients and cannot be used,” Roos said, adding that even FTX’s terms of service stated that user deposits belonged to users.
According to the evidence, there was a “huge difference between what FTX said it had for clients and what it actually had” and how billions of dollars were missing, Roos said. “These are not complicated cryptographic (terms). It’s about deception. These are lies. “It’s about theft, greed.”
