SEC Bars Ellison for 10 Years; FTX ‘Inner Circle’ Face Final Corporate Exile
Caroline Ellison receives a 10-year director ban while Wang and Singh get 8 years as the SEC wraps up its civil pursuit of the FTX leadership.
The Final Gavel Drops
The regulatory cleanup of the FTX collapse is effectively complete. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed proposed final consent judgments Friday against Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh, officially barring the trio from public company leadership for up to a decade.
While criminal courts have already delivered prison time and probation, this civil action ensures the architects of the $8 billion fraud cannot legally steward a public firm until the mid-2030s. The zombie ticker FTT barely reacted, hovering at $0.50 (+5%) as speculators continue to trade the ghost of the exchange.
The Terms of Exile
According to the filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the bans are tiered based on culpability:
- Caroline Ellison (ex-Alameda CEO): 10-year officer-and-director bar.
- Gary Wang (ex-CTO) & Nishad Singh (ex-Engineering Director): 8-year bars each.
All three consented to the judgments without admitting or denying the allegations. Additionally, they face permanent injunctions against future violations of anti-fraud securities laws and five-year “conduct-based injunctions” that restrict their professional activities.
Institutional Context: The ‘Backdoor’ Closed
The SEC’s complaint reiterated the technical mechanism of the fraud: Wang and Singh wrote the code that granted Alameda an “unlimited line of credit” on FTX, exempting the hedge fund from the auto-liquidation protocols that applied to regular users. Ellison then deployed those customer funds to plug Alameda’s trading holes.
“Wang and Singh created FTX’s software code that allowed FTX customer funds to be diverted to Alameda, and Ellison used misappropriated FTX customer funds for Alameda’s trading activity.” — SEC Filing
This civil enforcement follows the criminal conclusions where Ellison received a two-year prison sentence, while cooperators Wang and Singh avoided jail time with sentences of time served and probation.
With Sam Bankman-Fried serving 25 years and his lieutenants professionally sidelined, the regulatory book on the FTX management team is closed.
