As Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who presided over the case, said later: "When he wasn't outright lying, he was often evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I've been doing this job for close to 30 years. I've never seen a performance quite like that...." [T]he judge ordered Sam to rise so that he might address him directly. Two hours or so earlier, Sam had shuffled into the courtroom in prison khakis with his head down and his hands oddly clasped behind his back. Just before he'd entered, his guards had told him he was meant to be wearing handcuffs and asked if he could create the impression that he was doing so...Everybody said that SBF deserved it because investors lost billions of dollars.“There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it’s not a trivial risk, not a trivial risk at all,” said the judge. “So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him.” He then sentenced Sam to 25 years in prison, with no possibility of parole.
It seems unfair to me for the judge to blame SBF for how he handled the hostile cross-examination. Of could he tried to put his deeds in a favorable light.
The bigger issue is that inivestors ultimately got all their money back. Yes, SBF took some crazy risks, but ultimately no one was harmed. The judge did not allow the jury to learn that.
Another case of financial fraud had an odd ending:
British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch’s former co-defendant in a US fraud trial has died after being hit by a car just days before a yacht carrying the now-missing tycoon sank off the coast of Sicily.Lynch is dead. Seems fishy to me. Almost no one defeats a prosecution like this. I don't believe that HP or AG Garland sent out hit men, but it sure is strange.Stephen Chamberlain, 52, a former VP of finance at Lynch’s former company Autonomy, was hit by the car while out running on Saturday, his lawyer Gary Lincenberg told CNN Monday.
The incident took place just two days before the British investor Lynch, 59, went missing along with five others after a tornado sank the luxury yacht carrying them off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday.
Both Lynch and Chamberlain were acquitted of fraud by a court in San Francisco in June, following charges related to the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11 billion in 2011.
Six people missing, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, and one dead after tornado sinks luxury yacht off Sicily Prosecutors had alleged the pair had schemed to inflate Autonomy’s revenue before selling to HP.
No comments:
Post a Comment