ray iii

FTX’s bankruptcy lawyers and advisers pocket $32.5M in February

February’s round of legal expenses for bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has been published, and it remains a scary figure for debtors.

A series of court filings from April 4 to April 10 detailed the monthly fee statements for February of the law firms involved with FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings, which come to a combined total of around $32.5 million.

The figure didn’t include the recompense for restructuring chief and CEO John J. Ray III, who pocketed $305,000 in February, according to a March court filing.

Ray’s remuneration for March came in at a similar figure, with an April 10 filing showing his total fees and expenses were $329,173.

The FTX chief billed at $1,300 per hour and reported working 255.9 hours for the period of March 1 to March 31. This makes his fees a whopping $327,470, with the remaining $1,703 for airfares, lodging, transport, meals and other expenses.

John J Ray III’s expenses and hourly billings for the month of March. Source: Kroll

The law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan sought a total of over $2.7 million in reimbursements for February. Partners at the firm billed between $1,246 and $1,917 per hour and associates billed between $747 and $1,183

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Lawyers Detail the ‘Abrupt and Difficult’ Collapse of FTX in First Bankruptcy Hearing

“You have witnessed probably one of the most abrupt and difficult collapses in the history of corporate America,” an attorney for FTX said during the company’s first bankruptcy hearing in Delaware on Tuesday.

James Bromley of Sullivan and Cromwell, representing FTX, detailed the company’s rise and collapse in a brief presentation during the hearing, explaining how the company fell apart within the course of two weeks after bankman-frieds-crypto-empire-blur-on-his-trading-titan-alamedas-balance-sheet/” data-ylk=”slk:a CoinDesk report” class=”link “a CoinDesk report showed that Alameda Research, a subsidiary of the overall FTX group, held an unexpectedly large amount of FTT tokens, issued by FTX itself.

There are over 100 different debtors tied to the FTX group that filed for bankruptcy, another attorney said.

Bromley called the case an “unprecedented matter,” tacitly acknowledging the chaos of FTX’s bankruptcy, which saw a hack the night it filed for bankruptcy and several days before typical first-day filings were available.

The new team at FTX, including new CEO John Ray III, has “assembled a team of investigators,” which includes former enforcement officials with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and former prosecutors, Bromley said. FTX has also retained crypto analytics firm Chainalysis to help it investigate

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