Bankrupt cryptocurrency company FTX filed 23 lawsuits Friday against Anthony Scaramucci (pictured above), his hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, and other organizations including Crypto.com and the Mark Zuckerberg-backed lobbying group Fwd.us.
These lawsuits are an attempt to claw back money for FTX’s creditors following the company’s collapse. FTX claims that the money targeted in these suits was part of “a campaign of influence-buying” by founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, conducted as the company was struggling to meet its own cashflow needs.
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 attempted 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 company went bankrupt, 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 conviction.
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, just a few months before FTX went bankrupt and Bankman-Fried was arrested.
According to the lawsuit, FTX also paid $12 million to sponsor Scaramucci’s SALT conferences and invested $10 million in 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 investors, 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, meanwhile, describes payments from FTX’s corporate 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 did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.
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