Unlock Editor Digest for free.
Rola Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Bill Huang, a former Wall Street trader, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, a rare reduction from grace for the Arcegos founder who was convicted earlier this year of massive market fraud. Big banks had lost billions of dollars.
Judge Alvin Hellerstein said on Wednesday that the actions of the 60-year-old, who pleaded guilty in July to fraud and market manipulation, warranted a “serious sentence”, comparing the scale of his crimes to FTX’s Sam. Banks is committed to Freud’s crimes. Recently sentenced to 25 years in prison.
During an eight-week trial this summer, Huang was shown to have used secret trading strategies to quietly boost the share price of media and technology groups including Discovery, Viacom and Tencent, before A series of negative events led to a sudden sell-off. In March 2021.
The ensuing fire sale rocked global equity markets and left Archegos’ creditors – including Credit Suisse, Nomura, Morgan Stanley and UBS – with combined losses of more than $10bn. It also prompted an overhaul of the due diligence process at Wall Street’s biggest banks.
In brief remarks before his sentencing, Hwang, a devout South Korean-born Christian who was once one of America’s wealthiest evangelicals, said he was “thankful to God” for his blessings. , and feels the pain of those who have suffered because of it. The result of the collapse of Archigos.
Relatively unknown outside financial circles, Huang — who came to the U.S. at age 19 barely speaking English and studying economics — worked at Tiger Management in New York from 1996 to 2001, where he was a hedge fund manager. The pioneer was Julian’s bodyguard. Robertson.
He then founded and ran Tiger Asia, a fund focused on Asian equities, which was hastily closed in 2012 after pleading guilty to insider trading and US fraud charges.
Soon after, Huang launched Archegos, investing a few hundred million dollars of his own. He took powerful positions in a handful of stocks known as swaps – a method that at the time allowed the buyer to hide his identity from the market – and $30bn before the fund was launched. Controlled assets of more than
U.S. prosecutors had asked Hellerstein to sentence Huang to 21 years in prison, and order him to forfeit his assets, arguing in court Wednesday that his fraud was “massive and persistent.”
Before the hearing, he wrote that Huang showed no sympathy for all Wall Street bank employees “who bought stocks at inflated prices and lost money when the price fell. . . . or his own.” For employees.”
In the weeks leading up to Huang’s sentencing, his lawyers cited his philanthropic work to spare him prison time and claimed that prosecutors had not proven that the relevant share prices were solely those of Arcegos. Fall due to trade.
“The prosecution cannot meet its statutory burden to exclude all damages from causes other than mere market manipulation,” Huang’s lawyers wrote.
“The bill is gone. . . . He lost it all,” Huang’s attorney, Danny James, argued in court Wednesday. Hellerstein replied that he still owned a house in New Jersey and rented an apartment in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards.
Former Archigos Chief Financial Officer Patrick Halligan, who was tried along with Huang and found guilty on three counts, will be sentenced at a later date.
