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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly e-newsletter.
One of many nice mysteries surrounding collapsed crypto trade FTX is a step nearer to being solved: where is the other Sam?
We all know the place the principle Sam (Bankman-Fried) is — in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Heart (reportedly sleeping in the same part of the jail as Diddy), practically twelve months right into a 25-year sentence for fraud.
However the location of Sam Trabucco have been a fair higher thriller than why Michael Lewis can’t take criticism.
Let’s refresh our reminiscences on Trabucco’s position within the FTX mess. You’d be forgiven for having forgotten, since he’s just about disappeared because the Bankman-Fried empire collapsed.
Trabucco labored at Alameda Analysis from the start, sitting in Bankman-Fried’s inside circle. He turned co-chief government and ran the hedge-fund-cum-venture-capital-firm-cum-private-credit-unit alongside Caroline Ellison, however left the corporate in August 2022 — only a few months earlier than all of it blew up.
Not like Ellison, and different key executives together with Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, Trabucco has escaped virtually any scrutiny of his position in FTX’s collapse. He wasn’t arrested, didn’t take the stand towards his former boss and has stated nothing publicly concerning the matter.
However due to a submitting made on Monday, we will now see what he’s spent no less than a few of his time doing: settling privately with US authorities.
“Following intensive, arm’s size negotiations”, Trabucco has agreed handy over the keys to 2 San Francisco flats value $8.7mn that he purchased in June 2021, based on paperwork filed at Delaware’s chapter courtroom (obtainable through administrator Kroll’s website, ctrl-F “Trabucco” here).
Trabucco additionally agreed to switch the rights to $70mn value of claims filed towards FTX to the debtors, which embody balances on FTX’s worldwide and US exchanges, and is “together with compensation” that he acquired from Alameda.
He additionally agreed to surrender his 53-foot yacht, ‘Soak My Deck’, which he purchased in March 2022 for $2.51mn. Trabucco seems to nonetheless be in San Francisco from the submitting signature.
In whole, the debtors will obtain from Trabucco “roughly $80mn in worth with out the necessity for doubtlessly expensive and time-consuming litigation”, based on the doc.
It additionally sheds mild on Trabucco’s position at Alameda — and his rewards. He was paid $20mn in money throughout his time there, in addition to receiving FTT and SRM tokens, and firm fairness. In a lawsuit additionally launched yesterday, wherein the FTX directors are suing Binance, they declare the trade and its sister buying and selling home “might have been bancrupt from inception and positively had been balance-sheet bancrupt by early 2021 “.
No downside although!
Between July 2020 and October 2021, Trabucco bought a few of his FTT for about $30mn, with the submitting saying that from his wage, withdrawals from his FTX.com accounts and, “different transfers made . . . for his profit”, Trabucco totted up a tasty $40mn.
The acquisition of the yacht factors to extra mixing of enterprise with pleasure, as we now know FTX executives had been wont to do: Trabucco transferred 2.51mn USDC from his FTX account to certainly one of Alameda’s FTX accounts, after which Alameda wired the vendor of the yacht $2.51mn, based on the submitting.
Trabucco has till 26 November to enchantment towards the phrases of the settlement.
In comparison with the destiny of his colleagues, a lot of whom will likely be consuming jail meals for some time, waving bye-bye to the boat isn’t a foul end result.
