The liquidators of the American cryptocurrency exchange platform FTP extension said Wednesday it had recovered more than $5 billion worth of assets that could be returned to the company’s customers and creditors.
These assets include cash, cryptocurrencies and financial securities.liquids“, That is to say, easily convertible into cash, explained one of the group’s lawyers, Andrew Dietderich, during a hearing before the federal bankruptcy court in Wilmington (Delaware), in the eastern United States.
Risky financial transactions
In the filing document for bankruptcy of FTX, filed in early November, the group had quantified its liabilities between 10 and 50 billion dollars. This includes the frozen assets of the platform’s clients, which included more than 9 million accounts according to the lawyer, as well as FTX’s debts. Former FTX executive Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of misappropriating funds deposited by customers on the platform, to use them without their authorization in risky financial transactions, mainly in cryptocurrencies, through another company, Alameda Research.
Arrested at the end of December in Nassau (Bahamas), then extradited to the United States, he was charged with fraud and criminal association by a federal judge in New York. He risks several decades of imprisonment. In addition to the $5 billion quoted on Wednesday, FTX indicated they have gotten their hands on the assets.”illiquidin cryptocurrencies, i.e. that cannot be sold in the short term. Concretely, this capital is denominated in very volatile digital currencies and “they cannot be sold without affecting the corresponding marketand lower the value of this currency, explained Andrew Dietderich.
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Added to this are the assets recovered by the liquidators of FTX in the Bahamas, the value of which was estimated at the end of 2022 at $170 million. After an initial scam, the new top management of FTX and the liquidators of the Bahamas have reached an agreement, which foresees that all the sums recovered, in the United States and in the Bahamas, will be used to compensate customers and creditors. With the creditors’ agreement, FTX has initiated the sale of four of the group’s entities, including its Japanese subsidiary FTX Japan and a cryptocurrency-based financial derivatives trading platform, LedgerX.
FTX’s new executives are also preparing to divest more than 300 investments.not strategicwith a total book value of more than $4.6 billion, according to Andrew Dietderich of Sullivan & Cromwell. Former FTX and Alameda officials are accused in particular of having used part of the embezzled funds to purchase real estate, mainly in the Bahamas.
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