On Thursday, FTX, led by new CEO John J. Ray III, filed a motion in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court seeking to impose an automatic stay or lengthen the stay orders on Sam Bankman-Fried’s $440 million worth of Robinhood Markets shares.
According to an investigation, Robinhood stocks are the asset of the crypto exchange firm and its affiliates.
FTX wants to take over SBF’s Robinhood shares
56 million shares of the brokerage possessed by Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd. are in question; this company was established in Antigua and Barbuda, and according to the filing, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, controls 90% of it.
According to the filing, BlockFi, a lender that SBF’s exchange assisted in supporting earlier this year, Yonathan Ben Shimon, an FTX creditor who was assigned as a receiver in Antigua and given permission to sell the shares while being supervised by a court there, and Bankman-Fried himself have all attempted to gain control of those shares (who has legal bills).
Around the time the Chapter 11 case started on November 11, FTX’s bankruptcy estate instructed the brokerage where the shares are docked, ED&F Man Capital Markets, to freeze the stock. According to FTX, Emergent only “nominally” owns the shares; in reality, FTX actually owns them.
The cryptocurrency exchange stated in the filing that “Emergent is a special-purpose holding company that appears to have no other business.”
The exchange argued in the filing that the shares should be ordered to remain frozen while it tries to come up with a plan to pay off all of its creditors.
“The fact that multiple prepetition creditors of different Debtors and Mr. Bankman-Fried are all seeking to obtain possession of the Robinhood Shares demonstrates that the asset should be frozen until this Court can resolve the issues in a manner that is fair to all creditors of the Debtors.”
The exchange said
SBF was released on a $250 million bond bail on Thursday, but the FTX debtor is still attempting to take control of assets connected to FTX and Alameda Research. The bail was prearranged, and SBF was put under house arrest in the Palo Alto home owned by his parents, eminent Stanford University law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried.