The bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX is suing its founder Sam Bankman-Fried and three other former executives for $1bn (£780m).
FTX collapsed in November and Bankman-Fried was arrested the following month in the Bahamas over allegations he stole customer funds and extradited to the US, where he has pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws and bribe Chinese authorities.
An executive team led by his successor as FTX chief executive, the restructuring expert John Ray, has instigated the new lawsuit, which takes aim at a litany of share awards, property purchases, cash transfers and other transactions that the company says should be reversed under US bankruptcy law.
It is an effort by Ray to reclaim assets he says belong to creditors, including thousands of individual customers who lost access to their assets when FTX suspended withdrawals last autumn. According to multiple reports, an estimated $1bn worth of investor assets appears to be missing.
The lawsuit targets Bankman-Fried, as well as the co-founder and former chief technology officer Gary Wang.
Also named in the complaint as beneficiaries of the allegedly illicit transfers is FTX’s former director of engineering Nishad Singh, and Caroline Ellison, a former chief executive of Alameda Research, a trading firm and key FTX unit started by Bankman-Fried.
Last year, Ellison, Wang and Singh pleaded guilty to charges including fraud in criminal cases related to the collapse of FTX, unrelated to the new lawsuit.
If convicted over the separate US criminal charges at his trial due to start on 2 October, Bankman-Fried faces a possible sentence of decades in prison.
In a court filing in November, Ray, who has overseen some of the biggest bankruptcies, said that the situation at FTX was “unprecedented”, and that the group behind FTX were, “inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals”.
He added: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate control and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.”
