The new management of FTX, appointed after the bankruptcy filing, which oversees the bankruptcy process, has filed a new lawsuit against the co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to cover the losses from over $1 billion worth of suspicious transactions.
They Used Customer Funds for Their Personal Gain
In the new lawsuit filed by FTX’s new management in Delaware bankruptcy court, they named co-founder Gary Wang, who was also the former chief technology officer alongside Sam Bankman-Fried, as well as former engineering director Nisha Singh and Caroline Ellison, co-general manager of Alameda Research. The complaint alleges that all these individuals engaged in fraudulent transactions that benefited themselves personally, not the cryptocurrency exchange.
FTX’s new management accuses the defendants of consistently misusing customer funds to finance luxury apartments, political donations, speculative investments, and personal projects, highlighting that this is one of the largest financial frauds in the company’s history.
In the lawsuit, it is alleged that Bankman-Fried and Wang borrowed a $546 million loan from Alameda Research in May 2022 to purchase Robinhood shares, without providing any collateral to Alameda Research. It is stated that they continuously obtained fake loans using this method and were allowed to make payments at lower interest rates than usual. The details of the case also include that only Ellison provided similar loans.
FTX Exchange Opens Recovery Mode
Leading the management of the current and ongoing bankruptcy process is John Ray. Under Ray’s leadership, the cryptocurrency exchange is striving to recover funds used by the platform and senior figures at FTX.
The filed lawsuits are part of a larger strategy led by FTX’s new CEO Ray and his team to recover funds and make repayments to creditors, including customers who lost their cryptocurrencies when the exchange declared bankruptcy in November 2022. FTX is using bankruptcy rules to recover all suspicious payments made before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the current management at FTX plans to revive the cryptocurrency exchange and reopen it later this year. In this regard, the recovery of funds used for personal interests by Bankman-Fried and the others is expected to expedite the process of reactivating the cryptocurrency exchange.
