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The former head of engineering at crypto exchange FTX has been spared a prison sentence after cooperating with prosecutors in the criminal case against founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Nishad Singh, a 29-year-old programmer, was sentenced Wednesday to supervised release and ordered to forfeit his share of more than $11 billion in assets, including a stake in an AI company and a home in the San Juan Islands .
Singh pleaded guilty last year to fraud and campaign finance violations and was a key witness at the Bankman-Fried trial, telling the jury that the FTX founder had spoken to him about a billion-dollar hole in client funds, long before the stock market crashed.
Bankman-Fried was subsequently found guilty of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
During a hearing in Manhattan federal court, Judge Lewis Kaplan said he was “fully convinced” that Singh’s involvement in the FTX fraud was “much more limited” than that of Bankman-Fried. He said Singh “did the right thing” by immediately providing assistance to prosecutors.
Previously, Singh had told the court he was “overwhelmed with remorse” over his role in FTX’s fraud. Slowly and deliberately, he said that he “wanted to be someone who makes a positive contribution to society. . . and is seen as making serious efforts to correct his mistakes.”
Singh’s attorneys had argued for a light sentence on the grounds that he “did not join the conspiracy at the heart of this case – the theft of FTX customer funds” until September 2022, according to court records.
Prior to his sentencing, Singh also received a letter of support from John Ray III, the restructuring expert who oversaw FTX’s bankruptcy and has excoriated Bankman-Fried and others in the exchange for their reckless gambling with customer funds.
Ray told the court that Singh had provided “valuable assistance and cooperation” in the bankruptcy and that his “personal involvement in many significant events and transactions” meant he would “remain instrumental in maximizing recoveries for creditors”.
Singh, the youngest member of the FTX inner circle, left Facebook to join exchange-affiliated hedge fund Alameda in late 2017. Singh, a close friend of Bankman-Fried’s younger brother, with whom he had gone to high school, said during the trial that he initially had “a lot of admiration and respect” for the elder Bankman-Fried, but that “it fizzled out.” disappear over time.”
He walked the jury through a spreadsheet of multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals that FTX had agreed to, including one to change the name of Miami’s professional basketball arena, and attempts to buy the endorsements of celebrities such as American sports stars Tom Brady and Stephen Curry, in which he claimed that such expenditures were unjustified. ‘excessive’ and ‘smelled like . . . flashiness”.
Last month, Kaplan sentenced Caroline Ellison, the former boss of the trading firm through which FTX gambled away billions of dollars in client funds, to two years in prison, despite a recommendation from prosecutors that she be spared a custodial sentence for her early and heinous complicity. operation with the US government and its testimony at the trial.
Kaplan acknowledged that Ellison was “genuinely remorseful” but said her assistance to the government was not a “get out of jail free” card.
A third FTX director who pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, Gary Wang, will be sentenced later this year.