A federal judge credited Nishad Singh's substantial assistance to prosecutors as he sentenced the key cooperator in the criminal fraud case against Sam Bankman-Fried to time served, plus three years of supervised release, for his role in FTX’s theft of $8 billion in customer funds. Singh, 29, formerly FTX’s director of engineering, testified against Bankman-Fried under a plea agreement in which he admitted charges of wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations. Prosecutors supported a lenient sentence in light of Singh’s cooperation, reports Courthouse News Service. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said the haste and breadth of Singh’s cooperation with prosecutors underscored “serious moral interest,” beyond just self-interest. “You very quickly, within days of the bankruptcy, told the truth,” Kaplan said.
Singh’s defense attorney Andrew Goldstein, a former chief of the public corruption unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, urged the judge to consider Singh’s “laudable, across-the-board cooperation” and ongoing aid in helping FTX debtors recover assets. Prosecutor Nicolas Roos said Wednesday that without Singh’s evidence, an entire campaign finance scheme implicating Bankman-Fried that was not previously known about “would only have been discovered by the detailed tracing of financial records.” At Bankman-Fried’s trial, Singh said that before FTX’s collapse into bankruptcy in November 2022, Bankman-Fried directed the company to spend large sums of money pursuing cultural and political powers in a bid to legitimize cryptocurrency and bolster FTX as the superlative exchange for cryptocurrency trading. Bankman-Fried, 32, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
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