The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has agreed to return donations totaling more than half a million dollars it received from bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund FTX.
The Met received $550,000 from FTX’s US entity West Realm Shires Services last spring, months before the crypto exchange collapsed in November 2022. The museum agreed to return the sum in in its entirety, according to publicly available information. court documentsas CoinDesk first reported.
“The Met wishes to return the donations to the FTX Debtors, and the FTX Debtors and the Met have entered into good faith and arm’s length negotiations regarding the return,” according to the court filing. A refund must be made within one month of court approval.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art received a donation of $300,000 in March 2022, followed by another $250,000 in May 2022. According to the court document, upon receipt of the returns, the parties “will exchange unconditional, irrevocable, and mutual releases of any complaint”. , Counterclaims, Demands, Liabilities, Suits, Debts, Costs, Expenses and Causes of Action”.
FTX owes around $8 billion to over a million former clients. The company’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in December 2022 for fraud, illegal campaign contributions, foreign bribery and conspiracy. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. His trial is scheduled for October.
Bankman-Fried was a proponent of a philanthropic model called “effective altruism“, who argues that a combination of reason, data and capital accumulation can better address the ills of the world, especially the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to society. While he had promised to do donating the majority of his fortune to worthy causes, his company is now seeking to recover donations to repay creditors, asking politicians last February this year to voluntarily return donated funds under threat of bankruptcy lawsuits. , FTX had managed to retrieve $6.2 billion in assets.
