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Jurors delivered a guilty verdict Wednesday against Archegos founder Bill Hwang on 10 of 11 charges including market manipulation, fraud, and racketeering conspiracy for his scheme that caused more than $100 billion in damage when it unraveled over several days in 2021. Prosecutors alleged that Hwang lied to banks about how heavily his family office was betting on certain companies, including ViacomCBS, to get capital it needed to jack up their share prices.
But it wasn’t just Hwang who was found guilty. Prosecutors convinced the jury that the fraud, which also played a role in sinking Credit Suisse, couldn’t have taken place without Archegos’s former CFO, Patrick Halligan.
Unlike his former boss, Halligan wasn’t charged with market manipulation, but the lies of both made it possible for the company to get the credit it needed to puff up the stocks, which “fraudulently inflate[d]” Archegos’s portfolio from $1.5 billion to $36 billion, US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement after the verdict.
Halligan, 47, could face a 60-year prison sentence for his conviction on two counts of fraud and one count of racketeering conspiracy.
Halligan and Hwang are each free on bond and will be sentenced on Oct. 28. Halligan’s attorney said he would appeal, BBC News reported.
Even a juror who had spent more than 30 years on Wall Street was convinced to vote for Hwang’s conviction, Bloomberg reported, “because he was trading on such a large scale and it had a manipulative impact on stocks.”
“The juror said he felt some sympathy for Halligan, who he thought might have been dragged into Hwang’s scheme.”