- SEC filed for 10-year and 8-year corporate leadership bans against Ellison, Wang, and Singh.
- The trio is permanently barred from violating federal securities laws under new consent judgments.
- Regulatory filings finalize the civil enforcement path following the $1.8B FTX investor fraud.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Thursday it has filed proposed final consent judgments against three former executives of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its trading affiliate Alameda Research.
The filings, submitted in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, involve Caroline Ellison, former chief executive of Alameda Research, Zixiao “Gary” Wang, former chief technology officer of FTX, and Nishad Singh, a former co-lead engineer at FTX.
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Pending judicial sign-off, the trio will face permanent injunctions against violating federal securities antifraud laws and five-year conduct-based restrictions. Ellison is set to endure a 10-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company, while Wang and Singh have agreed to eight-year bans.
This regulatory crackdown follows a period where all three executives cooperated with federal prosecutors, serving as star witnesses in the criminal trial against Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried was convicted in late 2023 on seven counts of wire fraud and conspiracy, resulting in a 25-year prison sentence.
The $1.8B Illusion: Regulators Detail Systematic Misuse of Assets
The SEC’s complaints, filed between late 2022 and early 2023, allege that from 2019 to 2022 FTX raised more than $1.8 billion from investors while falsely portraying the platform as having strong safeguards to protect customer assets.
According to regulators, Alameda Research was secretly granted special privileges on the FTX platform, including exemption from key risk controls and access to customer funds through a virtually unlimited credit arrangement. The SEC said Wang and Singh helped design software that enabled customer assets to be transferred to Alameda, while Ellison oversaw Alameda’s trading activities using those funds.
The agency further alleges that hundreds of millions in customer liquidity were repurposed for venture capital bets and personal loans to executives, including Bankman-Fried himself.
No Admission of Wrongdoing
Without admitting or denying the SEC’s allegations, Ellison, Wang and Singh agreed to the proposed judgments, which would formally conclude the agency’s civil enforcement actions against them.
The case stands as a landmark for the SEC’s oversight of digital asset markets, highlighting an aggressive posture toward executive accountability in the wake of industry-defining failures. FTX’s bankruptcy in November 2022 remains the largest insolvency in the history of the sector, sparking a global regulatory reset.
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Source: https://coinedition.com/sec-seeks-long-term-ftx-sec-executive-bans-for-former-trio/
