Trading firm Alameda Research has filed a new lawsuit seeking to recover about $445.8 million from the bankrupt crypto broker Voyager Digital.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder and CEO of FTX, also co-founded the trading firm in 2017. A day before FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, it emerged that the crypto exchange had lent customer funds to help prop up Alameda Research.
The latest lawsuit, filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on January 30 by FTX lawyers filing on behalf of Alameda, relates to loans Voyager made to Alameda before the crypto broker’s bankruptcy in July 2022.
Voyager demanded repayment of all outstanding loans to Alameda, which, according to the filing, were fully repaid before FTX, along with Alameda filed for its own bankruptcy, in November.
“The collapse of Alameda and its affiliates amid allegations that Alameda was secretly borrowing billions of FTX-exchange assets is widely known,” the filing reads. “Largely lost in the (justified) attention paid to the alleged misconduct of Alameda and its now-indicted former leadership has been the role played by Voyager and other cryptocurrency ‘lenders’ who funded Alameda and fueled that alleged misconduct, either knowingly or recklessly.”
The court document went on to say that the bankrupt crypto lender’s business model “was that of a feeder fund.”
“It solicited retail investors and invested their money with little or no due diligence in cryptocurrency investment funds like Alameda and Three Arrows Capital. To that end, Voyager lent Alameda hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency in 2021 and 2022,” reads the filing.
Alameda claims all loans to Voyager repaid
As detailed in the document, Alameda paid Voyager almost $249 million in September and approximately $194 million in October. Additionally, the trading firm made a $3.2 million interest payment in August.
FTX lawyers now assert that these funds are recoverable “on an administrative priority basis pursuant to sections 503 and 507 of the Bankruptcy Code” and can be used to repay the exchange’s creditors.
FTX.US, the American division of FTX, was expected to acquire Voyager after winning the $1.46 billion bid to buy the digital asset manager out of bankruptcy in September last year.
Adding more complication to the case, Alameda was also one of Voyager’s shareholders.
The news of Alameda’s lawsuit against Voyager comes after the troubled crypto broker was earlier this month granted initial court approval to sell some of its assets to Binance.US in a proposed deal worth roughly $1 billion.
