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Archegos Capital Management founder Bill Hwang, whose family office’s soaring portfolio briefly made him worth more than $30 billion, said he now only has around $55 million.
Hwang, who faces sentencing Wednesday in New York for fraud and market manipulation tied to Archegos’ spectacular 2021 collapse, estimated his current wealth in a Monday court filing. His lawyers are pushing back against prosecutors’ request that Hwang be forced to pay $10 billion to compensate his victims, on top of spending 21 years in prison.
The proposed restitution order is “unsupported, unnecessary and unjustified,” Hwang’s lawyers said. They also suggested that it was pointless, saying Hwang’s net worth is less than 0.6% of the amount sought by the government and includes a number of jointly held assets.
Hwang was convicted in July of misleading Wall Street banks into helping him inflate the value of Archegos’ highly concentrated portfolio to as high as $36 billion before the bubble burst. Its counterparties lost some $10 billion, and the scandal was a major factor in the later demise of Credit Suisse Group AG.
Though the government is asking US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to sentence Hwang to more than two decades behind bars, his lawyers are asking for no prison time at all.
In Monday’s filing, Hwang’s lawyers made a similar argument against restitution as they did against prison. They said prosecutors haven’t shown that the losses suffered by the banks were directly caused by Hwang’s conduct.
The case is US v. Hwang, 22-cr-240, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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