Sam Bankman-Fried wants to retain ownership of Robinhood shares worth $450M

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried wants to retain control of Robinhood shares worth $450 million on the basis that the bankrupt exchange has no “legal claims” over the assets, according to a Jan. 5 court filing.

SBF said he and Gary Wang originally owned the shares. He added that the shares are not owned by Alameda Research or any other entity implicated in the FTX bankruptcy.

According to the court filing, the FTX debtor’s argument that Alameda financed the shares’ purchase under suspicious circumstances was false, as they were memorialized in four promissory notes.

The SBF’s filing added that it was “improper for the FTX Debtors to ask the Court to simply assume that everything Mr. Bankman-Fried ever touched is presumptively fraudulent.”

In a Dec. 22 filing, FTX urged the court to freeze the Robinhood shares until they can be distributed among FTX creditors.

BlockFi agrees with SBF’s motion

Meanwhile, bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi also argued against FTX’s request to freeze the shares in a separate filing on Jan. 5.

According to the crypto lender, FTX does not have the right to the shares that were pledged as collateral for a loan that Alameda secured from the crypto lender. The lender

However, all parties still have to contend with the US Department of Justice. The DOJ said it would be seizing the shares as part of its action against SBF. The DOJ counsel told the court that they believed that the assets did not belong to the bankruptcy estate.

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