Wang is ‘entitled to a lot of credit,’ judge says.
On Wednesday, ex-FTX executive Gary Wang got sentenced to three years of unsupervised release and time served for each of the four counts he pleaded guilty to. “I’ve never seen anything quite like what happened here,” said U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, 79, of Wang’s cooperation. “You’re entitled to a lot of credit.” Photo provided by Sarah Yenesel/EPA-EFE
FTX co-founder Gary Wang on Wednesday skirted prison time for fraud charges related to the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange.
Wang was sentenced to three years of unsupervised release and time served for each of the four counts he pleaded guilty to. Advertisement
“I’ve never seen anything quite like what happened here,” said U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, 79, of Wang’s cooperation. “You’re entitled to a lot of credit.”
Wang was the fifth and final individual to receive punishment in the FTX downfall and was ordered by Kaplan to forfeit $11 billion which was the same financial penalty given as the other related co-defendants.
“I will spend the rest of my life trying to make amends,” Wang said in court Wednesday in the presence of his parents and pregnant wife, who is herself an ex-FTX employee he married in 2023.
Wang took the stand against former boss and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and faced a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison for the four counts he pleaded guilty to including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Advertisement
In March, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Among other FTX executives to face Kaplan, Bankman-Fried’s on-again-off-again ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison — who was a key government witness — was given a two-year prison sentence in September for her role in the financial scandal described as one of the biggest in U.S. history.
During testimony, Bankman-Fried stated that he gave FTX a roughly 20% chance of being successful at the time when he partnered with Wang. The two were members of the same fraternity at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and met at a high school math camp.
Among the crimes, it was alleged that Bankman-Fried and Wang — the former FTX chief technology officer — took $546 million in May 2022 from a subsidiary company Alameda in order to acquire shares in Robinhood Markets Inc. Wang contends he never benefitted.
The U.S. government asked Kaplan for leniency for Wang. He was described as a cooperating witness, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos.
“I took the easy path, the cowardly path, instead of doing the right thing,” Wang told the court.
He flew to New York to begin cooperating with federal prosecutors once FTX collapsed. Wang also has been working on a tool for detecting potential illegal crypto activity as part of his ongoing cooperation, prosecutors say. Advertisement
“You immediately did the right thing,” the judge told Wang.
