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Three years in the past, a multibillion-dollar funding agency known as Archegos Capital Management blew up with little warning, inflicting massive losses for some Wall Street banks and resulting in federal legal expenses in opposition to the agency’s founder, Bill Hwang.
On Wednesday, Mr. Hwang, 60, who was charged with 11 counts of securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering and market manipulation, is ready to go on trial in Manhattan federal court docket. If convicted, he may spend the remainder of his life in jail.
Federal prosecutors are searching for to safe a conviction in a significant inventory market manipulation case by which Mr. Hwang, whose authorized identify is Sung Kook Hwang, was one of many massive monetary losers. Archegos had managed cash primarily for Mr. Hwang, his household and a few of his staff, and far of his household’s wealth was worn out when the agency collapsed in March 2021. Also on trial with Mr. Hwang is Patrick Halligan, the previous chief monetary officer of Archegos.
Authorities have stated Archegos inflated the costs of shares it invested in by utilizing tens of billions of borrowed {dollars} from Wall Street banks to maintain shopping for increasingly more shares. The surging share costs inspired different traders to purchase, pushing the costs even greater. At its peak, the technique elevated Mr. Hwang’s internet value to greater than $35 billion, and the general worth of the shares that Archegos owned was greater than $100 billion.
Damian Williams, the U.S. lawyer for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, known as Archegos’s scheme to pump up the value of shares “historic in scope” when his workplace introduced the submitting of expenses in opposition to Mr. Hwang and Mr. Halligan in April 2022.
Barry Berke, a lawyer for Mr. Hwang, declined to remark. But at a court docket listening to a number of months in the past, Mr. Berke stated his shopper “by no means offered a nickel of his shares.”
Mary Mulligan, a lawyer for Mr. Halligan, stated, “This is a case that ought to not have been introduced.”
Archegos was little identified earlier than its collapse and was not topic to a lot regulatory oversight as a result of it didn’t handle any cash for out of doors traders. Yet it operated like an enormous hedge fund given the extent of threat it had taken on and its outsize borrowings from banks — primarily by means of the usage of refined spinoff contracts.
The agency thrived every time the costs of the shares it purchased stored rising. But Archegos, which Mr. Hwang named after the Greek phrase for chief or prince, seemingly couldn’t deal with a sudden downward flip available in the market. It collapsed when a number of the shares it had invested in declined in worth, prompting Wall Street banks to grab securities and demand that the agency submit more cash as collateral.
The impression of Archegos’s failure on the inventory market was restricted, however a number of banks suffered losses. Credit Suisse, which UBS has since taken over, misplaced $5.5 billion. UBS itself misplaced about $861 million from lending to Archegos. Last summer time, UBS agreed to pay almost $400 million to regulators within the United States and Britain due to Credit Suisse’s threat failures within the Archegos affair. Nomura and Morgan Stanley have been among the many banks that additionally misplaced cash.
If convicted on all counts, Mr. Hwang may, in idea, be sentenced to 220 years in jail — although a sentence of 20 years is extra reasonable. By comparability, Samuel Bankman-Fried, the crypto entrepreneur who was sentenced in March to 25 years in a federal jail for defrauding clients out of $8 billion, confronted a most sentence of 110 years.
The trial begins with jury choice on Wednesday. Prosecutors intend to name as witnesses two former Archegos staff who pleaded responsible and agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
The federal authorities stated a essential part of the scheme concerned officers at Archegos who misled the banks concerning the agency’s general footprint available in the market. The authorities additionally contended that Mr. Hwang had engaged in a “pump and brag scheme” — a method designed to considerably improve the agency’s inventory holdings and make Mr. Hwang seem like an “extraordinarily rich individual.”
But prosecutors have but to elucidate simply how Mr. Hwang deliberate to revenue by driving up the costs of the shares Archegos owned. Even the federal judge who will preside over the trial stated he was flummoxed by Mr. Hwang’s technique of merely shopping for increasingly more shares.
“What did he need? What did he need to obtain? Being an enormous shot. I suppose that’s attainable, however it doesn’t appear to me that was his intention,” the judge, Alvin Hellerstein, stated at a listening to final 12 months. “I can’t work out his intention.”
Prosecutors have stated testimony about potential exit methods for Mr. Hwang will likely be produced on the trial.
This is the second time that Mr. Hwang, a former hedge fund manager, has been accused of violating federal securities legal guidelines.
In 2012, he reached a civil settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in an insider buying and selling investigation that concerned his outdated hedge fund — Tiger Asia Management — and was fined $44 million. Mr. Hwang was not criminally charged, however Tiger Asia pleaded responsible to federal insider-trading expenses in a associated motion introduced by federal prosecutors in New Jersey.
In settling with securities regulators, Mr. Hwang was barred from managing public cash for at the very least 5 years. Regulators formally lifted the ban in 2020. But as a substitute of managing cash for out of doors traders, Mr. Hwang targeted on managing cash for himself and his household.
