Reported by Joe Miller

Former Wall Street trader Bill Hwang has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, capping an extraordinary fall from grace for the Archegos founder who was earlier this year found guilty of orchestrating a massive market deception that cost big banks billions of dollars.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein on Wednesday said the actions of the 60-year-old, who was convicted of fraud and market manipulation in July, warranted “serious punishment”, and compared the scale of his crimes to those of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, who was recently given 25 years in prison.

During the eight-week trial this summer, Hwang was shown to have used secretive trading strategies to quietly drive up the share price of media and technology groups including Discovery, Viacom and Tencent, before a series of adverse events led to a sudden sell-off in March 2021. 

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

Read full report: https://www.ft.com/content/913fe92b-56d0-4e51-8044-9f453c3e9183