Comparing the sentences of Sam Bankman-Fried and Tom Hayes

Compare these two sentences, as tests used to say. First, Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-two-year-old American founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, who has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for a fraud that cost customers and investors $11 billion and for which, according to the New York judge, he uttered “never a word of remorse.” The jail term may look long but experts say he could be out in eighteen and at least Bankman-Fried has a prospect of sunshine before he’s old — unlike other US fraudsters such as Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi-scheme operator Allan Stanford, whose century-plus sentences ensured they would never be out at all.

Then there’s Tom Hayes, a forty-four-year-old British former trader for UBS and Citigroup, who was convicted in 2015 of rigging Libor rates and sentenced at Southwark crown court to fourteen years, reduced on appeal to eleven, of which he served half before being released in 2021. The original sentence was the harshest ever handed to a British white-collar criminal, the judge having decided to “send a signal” to other traders tempted to cheat and perhaps to punish Hayes for gaming the justice system — first co-operating with the serious fraud office, then switching to “not guilty” when he came to court — to avoid extradition to the US to face similar charges.

The irony is that US prosecutors have given up chasing Hayes and other alleged Libor riggers, having had several cases overturned for lack of conclusive evidence. But the UK’s court of appeal, declining to follow the US lead, reconfirmed Hayes’s conviction last week. His last hope of clearing his name will be the supreme court.

What comparisons and conclusions can we draw? Bankman-Fried was an attention-seeker who committed a shameless fraud but, on the harsh scale of US justice, has got off relatively lightly. Hayes was an oddball trading-floor genius who many observers felt was made a scapegoat for widespread malpractice, but at least his jail nightmare is over. Both were operating in global markets that are fertile for complex dishonesty counted in billions but have no agreed cross-border yardsticks either for crime or appropriate punishment. Perhaps what’s needed is a financial arm of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazines. Subscribe to the World edition here.