Once again we have news from FTX, currently the most famous crypto exchange that has gone bankrupt. The bankruptcy proceedings bring to light who all were customers of FTX – and to which politicians the founder Sam Bankman-Fried donated money.
Bankruptcy proceedings are like an autopsy. The patient is already dead, and the pathologist cuts open layers of skin and bends bones to find out what the condition of the internal organs is and what disease he died of. A lot comes to light that would otherwise have been hidden. This also applies to the insolvency proceedings for FTX – it now gives us two news.
Apple, Netflix and half the crypto industry
First, a 116-page document was released during the court proceedings that lists FTX’s institutional or corporate clients (9.7 million private individuals are not named). The list includes universities, airlines, charities, banks, city governments and world-renowned companies.
Some examples: media companies like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fox and Netflix. Universities like Stanford, crypto companies like Binance, Bitstamp, Bitmain, Bitgo, Chainalysis and Coinbase, tech giants like Apple. I looked at letters A through C and found many interesting names: Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Bahamas Treasury Department, Central Bank of Cyprus, Blackrock, Bloomberg, Chicago Stock Exchange, Citygroup, Chicago and Los Angeles municipalities , the commercial bank of Dubai. Apparently the whole world was a customer of FTX.
The list does not state how much money FTX owes to whom. But the insolvent exchange has admitted that it owes the top 50 creditors $3.1 billion, with the largest items being $226 million and $203 million, according to Coindesk.
Every third senator
But it doesn’t stop there. Because FTX is now asking, in the course of the bankruptcy proceedings, politicians to whom the stock exchange or Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has donated to pay back the money. More precisely: He does not ask, he demands.
Because it could turn out in the course of the process that the donations, with which managers of the exchange have cheered political campaigns, constitute “ fraudulent conveyance ”, the fraudulent transfer with the aim of avoiding repayment of debts. In this case, the recipients are obliged to repay the donations.
In the course of this, it became public knowledge to whom SBF had donated everything. And the list of politicians and campaigns who have received money from him is staggering.
BREAKING: FTX is sending letters to politicians who received donations from FTX to return the money they received.
There was not a list of the politicians they gave money to, and the amounts.
Until now.
See it here:https://t.co/uK8CTsLugJ pic.twitter.com/JnN2j8VFDL
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) February 5, 2023
One in three members of Congress, Coindesk calculates , has received money from Sam or other FTX managers: 196 out of 339 MPs. The largest amounts went to organizations and campaigns, especially the Democrats: e.g. the Democratic Campaign Committee, the Joe Biden campaign, the Heartland Resurgence Fund, Activate America. FTX donated about $10 million to the Democratic campaign in almost every state: Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota, Ohio, Maryland, New Mexico, Kansas, Massachussetts, Maine, Washington State, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Hawaii , Alaska, Arcansas, California and so on.
Republican politicians and institutions are represented much less frequently. But FTX has also generously supported the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), for example. There are also numerous individual politicians, including more Democrats than Republicans.
The sum of the donations far dwarfs what was already known. Sam Bankman-Fried was known to have donated tens of millions. But now it has been shown that the donations are in the middle three-digit range.
