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Robinhood, an American financial services company that sets up commission-free trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies, revealed it was able to buy back shares that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried previously owned.
Robinhood completed the buyback deal late last week and paid $606 million. The shares were part of the recovered assets when FTX went bankrupt last year. In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, it was disclosed that some seized shares that were once in the hands of SBF were sold to Robinhood shortly after a court's approval.
Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to several fraud charges concerning the collapse of his crypto exchange company, FTX. He was taken into custody and stays in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) while waiting for his trial set for Oct. 2.
In any case, Decrypt reported that when the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) took custody of the shares earlier this year, they were valued at $450 million. Robinhood indicated in its recent SEC filing that it used corporate cash to buy back the Bankman-Fried's shares.
"The U.S. Marshalls Service or their designees are authorized to pursue a private sale of the Robinhood Shares," District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote when he allowed the sale. He implied it was approved as "it is in the best interests of the relevant stakeholders."
As per CoinDesk, the deal happened after Robinhood agreed with the United States Marshal Service (USMS) to get back $605.7 million worth of stock from SBF, equivalent to 7.6%. This comes after the government seized 55 million Robinhood shares that the FTX co-founders owned - Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang. The regulators obtained the asset through Emergent Fidelity Technologies holding company in January.
Meanwhile, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York authorized the repurchase agreement for the shares. Not long after the news of Robinhood's buyback emerged, its stock price increased by around three percent to $11.21 on Friday's trading session.
