Bankman-Fried’s FTX, parents and senior execs bought luxury Bahamas properties worth $167m

NEW PROVIDENCE, Bahamas – Mr Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and his parents and senior executives of the failed cryptocurrency exchange bought at least 19 properties worth nearly US$121 million (S$167 million) in the Bahamas over the past two years, official property records show.

Most of FTX’s purchases were luxury beachfront homes, including seven condominiums in an expensive resort community called the Albany, costing almost US$72 million.

The deeds show that these properties, bought by a unit of FTX, were to be used as “residence for key personnel” of the company. Reuters could not determine who lived in the apartments.

The documents for another home with beach access in a gated community called Old Fort Bay show Mr Bankman-Fried’s parents, Stanford University law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories.

The property, said one of the documents, is for use as a “vacation home”.

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a holiday home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for – whether in cash, a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX – a spokesman for the professors said only that Mr Bankman and Ms Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX “since before the bankruptcy proceedings”.

While it is known that FTX and its employees bought real estate in the Bahamas, where it established its headquarters in September last year, the property records seen by Reuters show for the first time the scale of their buying spree and the intended use of some of the real estate.

FTX, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this month

after a rush of customer withdrawals, did not respond to a request for comment. Mr Bankman-Fried did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr Bankman-Fried has told Reuters that he lived in a house with nine other colleagues. For his employees, he said FTX provided free meals and an “in-house Uber-like” service around the island.

The collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has

left an estimated one million creditors facing losses totalling billions of dollars.

Reuters has reported that Mr Bankman-Fried secretly used US$10 billion in customer funds to prop up his trading business, and that at least US$1 billion of those deposits had vanished.

In a United States court filing earlier this month, Mr John Ray III, FTX’s new chief executive, said he understood that corporate funds of FTX Group were used to “purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisers”.

Reuters could not determine the source of funds that FTX and its executives used to buy these properties.

Property purchases

Reuters searched property records at the Bahamas Registrar General’s Department for those linked to FTX, Mr Bankman-Fried, his parents and some of the company’s key executives.

FTX Property Holdings, an FTX unit, bought 15 properties worth nearly US$100 million in 2021 and 2022.

Its most expensive purchase was a US$30 million penthouse at the Albany, a resort where golf great Tiger Woods hosts a golf tournament every year. The property records for the penthouse, dated March 17, were signed by Mr Ryan Salame, president of FTX Property, and show that it was intended as “residence for key personnel”.

Mr Salame did not respond to a request for comment.

Other high-end real estate purchases include three condominiums at One Cable Beach, a beachfront residence in New Providence. Records show that the condos cost between US$950,000 and US$2 million and were bought by FTX’s former head of engineering Nishad Singh, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and Mr Bankman-Fried for residential use.

Mr Singh and Mr Wang did not respond to requests for comment.

Two of FTX Property’s real estate holdings were marked for commercial use – a US$8.55 million cluster of houses that served as FTX’s headquarters, and a 2ha plot of land on the coastline overlooking cyan waters that was also meant to be developed into office space for the crypto exchange.

The FTX headquarters is now unoccupied while the plot of land, which cost US$4.5 million, lies empty. REUTERS