Alameda Lent SBF $546M For Robinhood Share Buy

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, used a loan of almost $546 million from Alameda Research, the exchange’s sister organization, to finance his acquisition of Robinhood shares.

Bankman-Fried thereafter put those very same shares up as collateral for a loan that Alameda got from BlockFi, which is one of the organizations that is staking a claim to the shares. The loan was taken out by Alameda.

An affidavit that was filed by Bankman-Fried on December 12 in the High Court of Antigua and Barbuda on the day of his arrest and made public on December 27 revealed that he and FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang took out the loans from Alameda between April and May using four promissory notes. The affidavit was made public on December 27.

On the 30th of April, Bankman-Fried and Wang were both awarded a loan of about the same amount, which was either $316.6 million or $35.1 million.

Bankman-Fried received two separate loans on May 15 in the amounts of about $175 million and $19.4 million.

The loans were used to support Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., a shell company domiciled in Antigua that was owned by Bankman Fried and purchased a 7.6% share in the brokerage business Robinhood in May at a price of $648 million at the time.

The disclosure of the loans has the potential to make the continuing legal struggle over the more than 56 million Robinhood shares, which are now valued around $430 million, more difficult.

The troubled cryptocurrency lender known as BlockFi has filed a lawsuit against Bankman-Emergent Fried’s in order to recover the Robinhood shares that were allegedly promised as security on November 9 for one of BlockFi’s loans to Alameda.

FTX intervened on December 23 and submitted a request for assistance to a bankruptcy court in the United States in order to prevent BlockFi from claiming the shares.

In addition, Bankman-Fried and Yonathan Ben Shimon, a creditor of FTX, are attempting to stake their claim to the shares.

In the past, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy papers that FTX had made in the United States disclosed that Bankman-Fried had been the beneficiary of a personal loan from Alameda in the amount of one billion dollars.