New CEO slightly more optimistic about recovering assets to repay creditors
FTX owes its 50 largest creditors about $3.1 billion, the failed cryptocurrency exchange said in a bankruptcy court filing Saturday. The filing didn’t name the creditors, but it listed them as customers. Two creditors are each owed more than $200 million.
FTX’s lawyers have said in all there could be more than one million creditors across FTX’s various entities.
Also Saturday, a statement from John J. Ray, the company’s new CEO, struck a slightly more optimistic tone about the possibility of recovering assets to repay those creditors. On Thursday, the veteran bankruptcy executive said he’d never seen anything as bad as FTX in 40 years in the restructuring business.
“We are pleased to learn that many regulated or licensed subsidiaries of FTX, within and outside of the United States, have solvent balance sheets, responsible management and valuable franchises,” said Ray, who was hired to oversee the company during its bankruptcy process, on Saturday.
FTX’s new management hired an investment bank to help sell viable parts of its business and discovered there were more than 200 accounts containing positive cash balances. A separate filing in federal bankruptcy court identified 216 bank accounts with positive balances, offering the possibility that there was some value left in FTX’s wreckage for creditors to recover. It verified account balances worth about $564 million, according to the filing. Much of that money, however, is either held in outside entities that directly filed for bankruptcy protection or is considered restricted cash, meaning others may lay claim to it.