Tyler Le, Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/Insider
- FTX's bankruptcy estate is going after the crypto exchange's top leaders to try to take back funds.
- Sam Bankman-Fried and others took "hundreds of millions of dollars," FTX alleged in a court filing.
- Caroline Ellison, once co-CEO of the trading firm Alameda, took a $22.5 million bonus, FTX said.
FTX's bankruptcy estate has accused Sam Bankman-Fried and top deputies including Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang of plundering their crypto enterprise before things came crashing down.
For instance, Ellison improperly took $22.5 million in bonus payments from Alameda Research, the trading firm she helped lead as co-CEO, FTX alleged in a filing this month in Delaware bankruptcy court.
The allegation was in the same complaint where the FTX estate said that Bankman-Fried and his associates had drained their crypto companies of "over a billion dollars" during the years leading up to FTX's bankruptcy in November.
The complaint alleged various schemes by Bankman-Fried, Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh, who was once FTX's director of engineering.
Ellison, Wang, and Singh have all pleaded guilty to charges by federal prosecutors amid the government's investigation into FTX's failure.
Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty, is headed toward a trial scheduled for October.
"Ellison caused Alameda, through a series of convoluted transfers, to transfer $22.5 million to Ellison's personal account on the FTX exchange," according to allegations by FTX, Alameda and other entities in a complaint filed earlier this month in Delaware bankruptcy court.
FTX alleged that Bankman-Fried and his associates pocketed huge sums of money from the enterprise, giving themselves tens of millions in loans they didn't pay back, and money they used to invest in other entities, according to FTX's complaint.
Bankman-Fried and his friends at his companies also used the money to secure real estate like the "$30 million, six bedroom penthouse in the Albany resort community in the Bahamas" they all lived in, according to FTX.
FTX had previously alleged that Ellison had also received about $6 million in payments from Alameda, though that was dwarfed by the roughly $2.2 billion that FTX alleged Bankman-Fried received from his businesses.
Representatives for FTX and Bankman-Fried both declined to comment.
Representatives for Ellison, Wang, and Singh did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Friday afternoon.