As Sam Bankman-Fried awaits sentencing for what could be up to 110 years in prison, one of his former business partners, Anthony Scaramucci, is awaiting word on a 30% stake that SBF's crypto exchange, FTX, had taken in his firm.
Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, said during the Yahoo Finance Invest conference Tuesday that he may not hear back anytime soon from the bankruptcy trustees, but he is "OK with that" — as long as he has a chance to eventually recoup the stake.
"It's only a $45 million problem on a $22 billion problem, so I don't think they're going to get to us anytime soon, and I'm OK with that because Sam didn't own any controlling stake. He had no economic preference, no voting stake," Scaramucci said.
But he would still like to buy the stake back, he said, and has filed his own claim against FTX for defrauding SkyBridge.
Lessons learned
Scaramucci said one positive thing from the FTX experience is that it showed that the US has provided strong protections and regulations in the current system to be able to prosecute fraud and protect US customers.
"What they eventually have to do is work on a global rubric like they have with the banks. They have to help the industry mature," Scaramucci said of governments.
The FTX debacle also proved that, time and again, a tight-knit circle is often responsible for major frauds. "Go back to the Madoff crime. It was him, his brother, his assistant and an accountant. Several billion dollar crime — they got it to go for 30 years. Sam was doing that," Scaramucci said.
He parted with advice for investors when doing due diligence on a private company: "What are the checks and balances in the system? ... You want to go with the people that are very formal about that."
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Anjalee Khemlani is the senior health reporter at Yahoo Finance, covering all things pharma, insurance, care services, digital health, PBMs, and health policy and politics. Follow Anjalee on all social media platforms @AnjKhem.
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