Robert Belfer was an oil entrepreneur who is also the patriarch for the elite Belfer clan. He lost money when cryptocurrency platform FTX went bankrupt, many years after he had suffered financial losses from Enron fraud and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme.
According to a Financial Times report, court documents reveal that investments funds connected to the Belfer family were listed as shareholders in FTX. FTX is a fraudulent digital asset company run by Sam Bankman-Fried (30). As of January 2013, Belfer Investment Partners (and Lime Partners) had a total of $34.5 million invested in the company.
Robert Belfer and his wife, Renée, are philanthropists who have donated heavily to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the institution’s Greek and Roman galleries bear the Belfer name, as does the international affairs center at Harvard Kennedy School. Robert Belfer was born to Arthur Belfer who emigrated from Poland shortly after Nazi Germany invaded. His company started trading in petroleum products, foam rubber and feathers before he began to import them.
Belco Petroleum Corporation was later a Fortune 500 firm and was purchased by Enron’s predecessor. This made the Belfer family shareholders in the company. Robert Belfer was a member of Enron’s board from 2002 to 2002. This happened five years after the company became insolvent. It cost the Belfers approximately $2 billion.
A family of just $110million had lost its net worth. The family was able to withdraw $28 million from Bernie Madoff’s investment advisory. The late financier’s Ponzi scheme was discovered shortly after the stock market crash of 2008. According to the New York Post, Irving Picard was the trustee who sought to recover funds for Madoff victims. He filed suit against the family in order to get investments to help other victims. Unknown is the outcome of these legal proceedings.
Eight charges were filed against Bankman-Fried earlier in the month, which was often compared with Madoff’s scheme. Celebrities such as Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel ex-wife Gisele Bündchen received combinations of equity and cryptocurrencies as reimbursement for appearing in advertisements and publicly endorsing FTX; they now face a lawsuit accusing them of participating in a “fraudulent scheme”Unsophisticated investors are not recommended.
FTX was destroyed after users found out that the funds of their sister trading firm Alameda Research were being used to fund a rival company, Alameda Research. This Alameda Research partner was a former lover interest for Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried attempted unsuccessfully to get investors, but a number of institutional and individual clients still had funds in excess of $8 billion. John Ray III, a bankruptcy law expert, was appointed to oversee the FTX bankruptcy proceedings. “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.”
The funds were used by Bankman-Fried, along with other executives to buy luxury real estate in the Caribbean and to make substantial political contributions to Democratic candidate. To repay investors and customers who were defrauded, attorneys have recovered assets in excess of $5 billion.
Check out the complete article here
