The New York oil tycoon, who lost billions in the Enron collapse and invested tens of millions in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, was also hit by the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange. rice field.
Robert Belfer, 87, whose family has made several charitable donations to institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University and Yeshiva University, was listed in court documents as a shareholder of FTX, according to the Financial Times.
Belfer Investment Partners and Lime Partners LLC, two companies associated with family businesses, held shares in FTX and its U.S. subsidiary, FTX US, according to the documents.
The two companies had a combined stake of $34.5 million when they joined the equity funding round early last year, according to court documents cited by the Financial Times.
The Belfers have declined to comment publicly on the matter.
The Belfer family joins other wealthy celebrities like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Superstar quarterback Tom Brady. Brady’s supermodel ex-wife, Gisele Bundchen. others.
Brady owns 1.1 million shares of common stock in FTX, a privately held company, and Bündchen owns 686,000 shares, according to the filing. It’s unclear how much they paid for the stock.
Brady, Bündchen, and other celebrity backers have been named in several lawsuits brought by investors who accused them of promoting a “massive Ponzi scheme.”
Former mogul Bankman-Fried, whose net worth was once valued at over $26 billion, has been indicted by the federal government on fraud and money laundering charges. He remains under house arrest after being released on his $250 million bail.
Bankman-Fried, 30, has pleaded not guilty. he denies wrongdoing.
Robert Belfer is the Polish-born son of billionaire oil executive Arthur Belfer, who fled his native Poland after the invasion of Nazi Germany.
Arthur Belfer came to the United States and founded Bellco Petroleum Corporation, which has grown into a Fortune 500 company. His son eventually became the president of the company.
In the mid-1980s, Belco Petroleum merged with InterNorth, Inc. InterNorth, Inc. was an Omaha-based energy company that eventually merged with Houston Natural Gas to become Enron.
The Belfer family has become one of Enron’s largest stakeholders with approximately $2 billion worth of stock.
But in the early 2000s, Enron, once worth as much as $70 billion, closed after it was discovered that the company’s management was using illegal accounting practices to hide huge amounts of debt from investors and creditors. , declared bankruptcy.
Ironically, attorney John Ray III, who was appointed by the bankruptcy court to lead FTX after Bankman-Fried resigned, was also appointed to clean up Enron’s chaos.
In November, Ray said the FTX scandal was worse than Enron.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate management and complete lack of reliable financial information as what happened here.
The Belfers also invested millions in former Wall Street executive Madoff, who died in prison after being convicted of orchestrating the biggest fraud in history.
After the Enron demise, the Belfer family extracted more than $28 million from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Irving Picard, the trustee responsible for liquidating Madoff’s assets and recovering victims’ funds, filed a lawsuit to recover the Belfers’ profits, according to court documents.
It is unclear how the lawsuit was resolved.