Bankrupt cryptocurrency firm FTX filed 23 lawsuits Friday in opposition to 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 marketing campaign of influence-buying” by founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, carried out as the corporate was struggling to fulfill its personal cashflow wants.
The lawsuit claims, “These ‘investments’ conveyed little to no profit to Debtors, and as an alternative served solely to prop up Bankman-Fried’s standing within the worlds of politics and conventional finance,” which he then tried to leverage as “potential sources of fairness funding in FTX to fill the opening within the stability sheet and, due to this fact, preserve his scheme afloat.”
Because the firm went bankrupt, FTX executives have been convicted of crimes together with fraud and cash laundering. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is at present appealing his conviction.
Within the case of SkyBridge and Scaramucci (a financier who briefly served as White Home Communications Director beneath Donald Trump), FTX announced that it was buying a 30% stake in SkyBridge in September 2022, just some months earlier than FTX went bankrupt and Bankman-Fried was arrested.
In keeping with 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 Center East” to pitch potential traders, with Scaramucci “so invested within the success of Bankman-Fried’s fundraising efforts that he lent Bankman-Fried his personal swimsuit and tie upfront of their conferences in order that Bankman-Fried wouldn’t present as much as vital conferences in his trademark shorts and a t-shirt.”
The Fwd.us lawsuit, in the meantime, describes funds from FTX’s company sibling Alameda Analysis to Fwd.us as “a part of an built-in plan by the FTX Insiders to siphon cash from FTX Group collectors and improve their very own private reputations on the expense of collectors.”
SkyBridge and Fwd.us didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
