Retail Trading Giant Robinhood Repurchases $605,000,000 Worth of Shares the Feds Seized From Sam Bankman-Fried

Retail trading giant Robinhood has bought back more than $605 million worth of shares of its own company that the US government seized from disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Wednesday, Robinhood entered into a share purchase agreement with the United States Marshal Service (USMS) to scoop up 55,273,469 shares of the company’s Class A common stock, priced at $10.96 per share.

The deal closed on Thursday.

The share price was determined “based on the arithmetic average of the per share volume-weighted average price of the company’s Class A common stock over each of the five consecutive trading days preceding August 13,” according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The shares were initially acquired by Emergent Fidelity Technologies, Bankman-Fried’s holding company, but the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seized the stock in January.

The DOJ said at the time that the seized assets were involved in money laundering and wire fraud criminal violations and were not properties of FTX’s bankruptcy estate. The crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy in November.

Bankman-Fried is currently awaiting trial and has been charged with defrauding investors and mishandling billions of dollars worth of customer funds related to FTX’s collapse last year. If convicted, he faces decades behind bars.

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