Reported by Barnini Chakraborty

Caroline Ellison, the ex-girlfriend and top executive in Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, will be sentenced Tuesday for her role in the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and its affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research.

Ellison’s defense team and prosecutors have asked Judge Lewis Kaplan for leniency, claiming her testimony against Bankman-Fried was key in the federal government’s case against him.

Ellison was CEO of Alameda Research, a channel through which Bankman-Fried defrauded millions of FTX investors out of nearly $8 billion in deposits. Funds from FTX were improperly used to cover billions of dollars lost by Bankman-Fried in investments and to fuel his lavish lifestyle.

Ellison was the government’s star witness in the lengthy trial and spent nearly three days on the stand, often delivering emotional testimony about how Bankman-Fried mistreated her and knowingly defrauded investors. She also described, in detail, an incriminating spreadsheet that Bankman-Fried used to mislead business partners and testified in front of a packed courtroom in Manhattan that he knew what he was doing all along.

She also told the jury that she and Bankman-Fried bribed Chinese officials with $100 million to regain access to more than a billion dollars in frozen cryptocurrency so they could continue their con to cheat investors out of their money. Alameda Research had its funds frozen on Chinese crypto exchanges OKX and Huobi.

Ellison told jurors that Bankman-Fried should be held accountable for all the crimes against him that led to FTX’s implosion.

Ellison, the daughter of Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professors, met Bankman-Fried when she was a summer intern at Jane Street, a global proprietary trading firm, in 2015. Three years later, the duo met for coffee in San Francisco, and Bankman-Fried convinced her to join Alameda Research, his new crypto trading firm.

Read full report: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/3160389/ex-girlfriend-ftx-founder-sentenced-fraud/