- Robinhood bought 55 million of its shares worth $605 million that Sam Bankman-Fried once owned.
- The stake was seized by the Department of Justice in January as part of charges against the FTX founder.
- Robinhood, SBF, FTX, and a bankrupt crypto lender had all laid claim to the seized shares.
Robinhood has bought back more than $600 million worth of its own shares that were owned by Sam Bankman-Fried before his arrest.
In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Friday, the trading platform said it had acquired 55 million shares from the United States Marshal Service (USMS).
The deal is worth more than $605 million. The same number of Robinhood shares were worth about $450 million when they were seized by the DoJ following the FTX founder’s arrest in January, but the stock has since risen more than a third this year.
Emergent Fidelity Technologies bought the Robinhood stake from Bankman-Fried, but went bankrupt shortly after FTX collapsed, bringing down intertwined companies with it.
The Robinhood shares made up the majority of a $700 million pool of Bankman-Fried’s assets seized following his arrest. He would be forced to give up the assets if found guilty of charges including fraud, money laundering, and violating campaign finance laws.
The sale settles a long-running four-party dispute. Bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi first sued Emergent Fidelity for the shares in November, claiming they had been promised as collateral for a loan.
FTX disputed this claim in December, arguing the assets should be seized until they could be fairly split among creditors. Then in January, Bankman-Fried argued he needed the stock to fund his legal defense.
Shares in Robinhood closed 2% higher Friday following the release of the filing, valuing the company at about $10 billion. Stock repurchases can lift a company’s share price by bringing down the supply of shares in open circulation.
It’s unclear what will happen to the funds now held by the Marshal Service.
Bankman-Fried was sent to jail last month after a federal judge revoked his bail, convinced that he’d repeatedly tried to influence witnesses against him, ahead of his trial in October.
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