Bankrupt cryptocurrency firm FTX filed 23 lawsuits Friday towards Anthony Scaramucci (pictured above), his hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, and different organizations together with Crypto.com and the Mark Zuckerberg-backed lobbying group Fwd.us.
These lawsuits are an try to claw again cash for FTX’s collectors following the corporate’s collapse. FTX claims that the cash focused in these fits was a part of “a campaign of influence-buying” by founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, performed as the corporate was struggling to satisfy its personal cashflow wants.
The lawsuit claims, “These ‘investments’ conveyed little to no benefit to Debtors, and instead served only to prop up Bankman-Fried’s standing in the worlds of politics and traditional finance,” which he then tried to leverage as “potential sources of equity investment in FTX to fill the hole in the balance sheet and, therefore, keep his scheme afloat.”
Since the corporate went bankrupt, FTX executives have been convicted of crimes together with fraud and cash laundering. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in jail and is at present interesting his conviction.
In the case of SkyBridge and Scaramucci (a financier who briefly served as White House Communications Director beneath Donald Trump), FTX introduced that it was buying a 30% stake in SkyBridge in September 2022, only a few months earlier than FTX went bankrupt and Bankman-Fried was arrested.
According to the lawsuit, FTX additionally paid $12 million to sponsor Scaramucci’s SALT conferences and invested $10 million within the SkyBridge Coin Fund. In return, FTX claims Scaramucci took Bankman-Fried on “a whirlwind tour of the U.S. and the Middle East” to pitch potential buyers, with Scaramucci “so invested in the success of Bankman-Fried’s fundraising efforts that he lent Bankman-Fried his own suit and tie in advance of their meetings so that Bankman-Fried wouldn’t show up to important meetings in his trademark shorts and a t-shirt.”
The Fwd.us lawsuit, in the meantime, describes funds from FTX’s company sibling Alameda Research to Fwd.us as “part of an integrated plan by the FTX Insiders to siphon money from FTX Group creditors and enhance their own personal reputations at the expense of creditors.”
SkyBridge and Fwd.us didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
