Major real estate purchases were made Sam Bankman Freedits creator FTX, a bankrupt digital currency trading platform, as well as his parents and top executives of the company. According to an exclusive report by Reuters, the aforementioned individuals have purchased at least 19 properties in the Bahamas worth nearly $121 million over the past two years, according to the country’s official mortgage registry records. It is recalled that the bankrupt company – a cryptocurrency exchange – is headquartered in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the majority of FTX’s purchases were luxury beachfront homes, including seven condominiums in an expensive resort called Albany, priced at about $72 million. The titles indicate that these properties, purchased by the FTX division, were to be used by the company as “key personnel housing”. Reuters was unable to establish who lived in the apartments.

Documents for another house with beach access in Old Fort Bay, a gated community that once housed a British colonial fort built in the 1700s to protect against pirate raids, were signed by the parents of businessman, Stanford University law professor Joseph Bankman and Barbara Freed. The property, according to one of the documents dated June 15, is intended to be used as a “vacation home”. When asked by Reuters about why they decided to make the purchase and how it would be repaid either in cash through a mortgage or from a third party such as FTX, he simply replied that Bankman and Freed were trying to pay off the property in FTX. “Prior to the initiation of the bankruptcy proceedings, the above person attempted to reclaim ownership of the company pending further instructions,” the spokesman said, without giving details. While FTX and its directors are known to have bought property in the Bahamas, where it opened its headquarters in September 2021, mortgage records show for the first time a buying frenzy and intended use of the property. Speaking to the news agency, FTX founder Bankman Fried said he lives in the house with nine other colleagues. He also stressed that he was providing his employees with free meals and an “Uber-style domestic transportation service” throughout the island.

The collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, left about 1 million creditors facing billions of dollars in losses, while Reuters indicated that Sam Bankman Freed secretly used $10 billion of customer deposits to fund his commercial activities and that at least $1 billion of those deposits has been liquidated. In Delaware bankruptcy court, new FTX head John Ray said he found that the company’s funds from the former were used to “purchase homes and other personal items for employees and consultants.” During the hearing, a lawyer representing FTX said that a significant portion of her assets were either missing or stolen.