PANews reported on November 16 that according to Wall Street Journal, Bill Hwang, the founder of Archegos, the "protagonist of the century's big liquidation", may be sentenced to 21 years in prison. In a document submitted to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein on Friday, prosecutors stated that Bill Hwang, 60, should be sentenced to a long prison term because he led one of the largest securities fraud schemes in history, causing billions of dollars in losses. Alvin Hellerstein will sentence the Archegos founder on November 20. Bill Hwang was found guilty of fraud and other charges by a jury on July 10. Prosecutors accused him of manipulating the market before Archegos collapsed in 2021. He was found guilty of 10 of the 11 charges he faced. Patrick Halligan, the former Archegos chief financial officer who was tried at the same time as him, was also found guilty of three counts, including extortion and fraud.
Public information shows that Bill Hwang is Korean and once worked as a stock analyst at Tiger Fund founded by Julian Robertson. In 2021, Archegos suffered a margin call due to unfavorable market conditions caused by the use of a large number of highly leveraged derivatives to evade reporting obligations. The incident caused an uproar throughout Wall Street and attracted regulatory scrutiny on three continents, causing global banks to lose up to US$10 billion, including US$5.5 billion to Credit Suisse (now UBS Group) and US$2.9 billion to Nomura Holdings, and caused shareholder losses of approximately US$100 billion. The incident was called "the largest single-day loss in history" and "the margin call of the century."