Reported by Joe Miller and Joshua Franklin

A New York jury has found former Wall Street trader Bill Hwang guilty of fraud and market manipulation, more than three years after the implosion of his fund Archegos sent tremors through global equity markets and left major banks nursing billions of dollars in losses.

The verdict on Wednesday came after an eight-week trial in which prosecutors sought to prove that Hwang lied to lenders and “deceived the market” with secretive trading strategies that allowed him to drive up the share price of a handful of media and technology groups, before a series of adverse events led to a sudden sell-off in March 2021.

Hwang, 60, a devout Christian born in South Korea who was once one of the wealthiest evangelicals in America, was expressionless as the verdict was read out, and calmly shook his legal team’s hands when proceedings were over. He remains free on bail until sentencing on October 28. His lead attorney Barry Berke declined to say whether Hwang would appeal against the verdict.

US attorney Damian Williams, whose office in the Southern District of New York brought the case, said Hwang had “lied about Archegos’s positions in these companies and just about every other materially important metric investment banks would use in determining the firm’s creditworthiness”.

Once banks that had lent to Hwang began to realise that Archegos’s portfolio consisted of outsized bets in a handful of companies, they demanded he deposit more funds into his accounts to cover the risk, and unwound their positions when he failed to pay up.

The ensuing sell-off left Archegos’s lenders — including Credit Suisse, Nomura, Morgan Stanley and UBS — with combined losses of more than $10bn, and prompted a revamp of due diligence processes at some of Wall Street’s biggest banks.

Read full report: https://www.ft.com/content/48916cfd-d81e-4256-936a-cd99d3b442d8