New York, Jun 5 (EFE).- The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York has announced that it is returning more than half a million dollars (550,000 in total, equivalent to 513,000 euros) that it received as a donation from the cryptocurrency platform FTX, which has turned out to be one of the largest contemporary large-scale scams.
According to a court document signed on Friday and echoed today by the portal www.artnews.com, the MET received a first donation of $300,000 on March 23, and another $250,000 on May 13, through a FTX-owned company called West Realm Shires Services.
The two donations had been agreed upon last October, a month before FTX declared bankruptcy, leaving thousands of users of the cryptocurrency business bankrupt; Shortly after declaring bankruptcy, its founder Sam Bankban-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States.
“The MET -says the court document- wishes to return the donations to the debtors of FTX (with whom) we have negotiated a transaction for their return in good faith (…) and without the need for subsequent litigation.”
It’s unclear how the long half million dollars came to be paid off months after the bankruptcy filing.
The founder and executive director of FTX, who is on probation, was an active donor to all kinds of causes, in addition to political campaigns, with a predilection for progressive causes, although he also donated to a Republican candidate.
Bankman-Fried is currently under house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto (California) after agreeing to a $250 million bail while awaiting a trial scheduled to begin next October.
If convicted of all the crimes of which he is accused – which include fraud, money laundering and paying bribes, among other things – he faces a sentence of more than one hundred years in prison. EFE
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2023-06-06 09:27:15
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