FTX seeks to recover donations made by exchange and Sam Bankman-Fried

FTX's new management is seeking to recover millions of dollars in donations made by the crypto exchange and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, reported the Wall Street Journal.

According to WSJ report, at the end of September, FTX's charity arm, Future Fund, had committed more than $160 million to over 110 non-profit organisations, including biotech startups and university researchers developing Covid-19 vaccines and working on pandemic studies, as well as non-profit organisations in India, China and Brazil.

According to the report, Future Fund committed $3.6 million to AVECRIS, a company working on a genetic vaccine platform, and another $5 million were donated to Atlas Fellowship for scholarships and high-school summer programs in San Francisco.

A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried said that charitable donations were not made from customer deposits, but from trading profits. The charity arm was announced in February 2022 planning to deploy over $100 million in its first year and reach up to $1 billion in donations, according to the WSJ report.

The report said FTX's donations to political parties and candidates were also under investigation by United States prosecutors. Bankman-Fried was the second-largest "CEO contributor" to Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, with $5.2 million in donations.

Clawback provisions could force businesses and investors to return billions of dollars paid in the months prior to the crypto exchange's collapse, Cointelegraph reported. FTX's new management says that "a number of recipients of contributions or other payments" have approached the company to return the funds, according to the report.