PANews reported on November 11 that according to Bloomberg, FTX filed a lawsuit against Binance and its former CEO Zhao Changpeng, seeking to recover nearly $1.8 billion that it accused Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) of fraudulently transferring. Binance, Zhao Changpeng and other Binance executives received the funds in a stock repurchase agreement reached with FTX co-founder SBF in July 2021. According to legal documents filed by the FTX Bankruptcy Property Management Committee on Sunday, in this transaction, Binance and Zhao Changpeng sold approximately 20% of the shares of FTX's international department and 18.4% of its U.S. entity. The documents show that SBF used FTX's exchange token FTT and Binance-branded tokens BNB and BUSD (worth $1.76 billion at the time) to pay for stock repurchases.
The bankruptcy estate said in the filing that FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research "may have been insolvent from the outset and were certainly insolvent by early 2021." As a result, the estate claimed that the stock buyback transactions were fraudulent. FTX also accused Zhao Changpeng of posting a series of "false, misleading and fraudulent tweets" shortly before FTX's collapse, the content of which was "maliciously calculated to destroy its competitors." In a tweet posted on November 6, 2022, Zhao Changpeng stated that Binance intended to sell its FTT tokens, which were worth about $529 million at the time, causing the exchange's withdrawal volume to surge. A Binance spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
