Alameda Research, the trading arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is seeking to recoup about $446 million in loan payments from similarly bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital.
According to a filing in Delaware bankruptcy court Monday, FTX — filing on behalf of Alameda — said that before Voyager filed for bankruptcy in July, it provided loans to Alameda, which Alameda repaid before it, too, filed for bankruptcy in November. Now, Alameda is trying to get those payments back, potentially to repay some of FTX’s other creditors.
FTX and Alameda offered to buy all of Voyager’s assets and loans last July, ostensibly to provide liquidity to Voyager’s customers, but Voyager rejected the offer, calling it a “low-ball bid dressed up as a white knight rescue.”
In September, FTX won the bidding for Voyager’s post-bankruptcy assets for about $1.4 billion.
Two months later, FTX declared bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO; he has since been indicted in a multibillion-dollar fraud case, which includes allegations that Alameda took money from FTX customers to pay for its risky bets. Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud in December and is said to be cooperating in the case against Bankman-Fried.
In Monday’s court filing, FTX accused Voyager of being part of the problem.
“Largely lost in the (justified) attention paid to the alleged misconduct of Alameda and its now-indicted former leadership has been the role played by Voyager and other cryptocurrency ‘lenders’ who funded Alameda and fueled that alleged misconduct, either knowingly or recklessly,” the filing said, alleging that “Voyager’s business model was that of a feeder fund. It solicited retail investors and invested their money with little or no due diligence in cryptocurrency investment funds like Alameda and Three Arrows Capital.”
(Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows declared bankruptcy in July.)
