US online brokerage Robinhood to buy back Bankman-Fried’s stake

Robinhood said on Friday it had entered into a share repurchase agreement with the US Marshal Service (USMS) for $605.7m to buy back stock from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Emergent Fidelity Technologies.

The shares of Robinhood were seized and subsequently transferred to the custody of the US government after Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Emergent filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022.

Robinhood shares climbed more than 3% in premarket trading on the news.

The online brokerage said the sale of the 55.3-million shares at $10.96 apiece had been approved by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Robinhood first disclosed its intention to buy back the stake in February and said the company’s board had authorised it to pursue purchasing most or all of the stock.

Just six months before his company filed for bankruptcy last November, Bankman-Fried disclosed a 7.6% stake in Robinhood but said he did not have any intention of taking control of the retail trading platform. He said at the time that FTX was “excited about Robinhood's business prospects and potential ways we could partner with them”.

Bankman-Fried rode a boom in the value of bitcoin and other digital assets to build a net worth of an estimated $26bn and become an influential political donor in the US, but FTX’s collapse wiped out his fortune.

He has pleaded not guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges stemming from the November 2022 collapse of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange.

In August, a US judge in Manhattan ordered that Bankman-Fried be jailed ahead of his October trial, finding that the former billionaire probably tampered with witnesses while confined to his parents’ Palo Alto, California, home on $250m bail. 

Reuters