FTX bankruptcy estate sues Anthony Scaramucci, FWD.us, others

Bankrupt cryptocurrency company FTX filed 23 lawsuits Friday against Anthony Scaramucci (pictured above), his hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, and other entities including Crypto.com and the Mark Zuckerberg-backed group Fwd.us.

These lawsuits are an attempt to recover money from FTX’s creditors following the company’s collapse. FTX says the money targeted in the suits was part of a “strategic buying spree” by founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, made at a time when the company was struggling to meet its cash flow needs.

The lawsuit says, “These ‘investments’ brought little benefit to the creditors, and instead only served to support Bankman-Fried’s stance on politics and traditional finance,” and tried to use them as “potential sources of equity. investing in FTX to fill a hole in the balance sheet and, therefore, to keep his plan running.

Since the company’s bankruptcy, FTX executives have been convicted of crimes including fraud and money laundering. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently appealing his sentence.

In the case of SkyBridge and Scaramucci (a financier who briefly served as White House Communications Director under Donald Trump), FTX announced that it was acquiring a 30% stake in SkyBridge in September 2022, a few months before the FTX lost and Bankman-Fried was arrested.

According to the lawsuit, FTX also paid $12 million to fund Scaramucci’s SALT conferences and invested $10 million in the SkyBridge Coin Fund. In return, FTX alleges that Scaramucci took Bankman-Fried on a “whirlwind tour of the US and the Middle East” to pitch to potential investors, and that Scaramucci was “so invested in the success of Bankman-Fried’s fundraising efforts that he loaned -Bankman-Fried’s suits and ties before their meetings so Bankman-Fried wouldn’t show up at important meetings in his trademark shorts and T-shirt.”

The Fwd.us lawsuit, on the other hand, describes the payments from FTX’s sister company Alameda Research to Fwd.us as “part of a coordinated scheme by FTX Insider to extract money from FTX Group’s creditors and enhance their personal reputation at the expense of creditors.” . “

SkyBridge and Fwd.us did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.