US Treasury, financial watchdogs, companies among FTX creditors, deposit issuances

By Noele Illien and Tom Wilson

ZURICH/LONDON (Reuters) – Financial watchdogs and government agencies from the United States, Japan and Switzerland are among the creditors of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, along with companies like Airbnb and the giant of the Binance crypto, according to a court filing.

FTX, once among the top crypto exchanges in the world, rocked the industry in November when it filed for bankruptcy, leaving around 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses of billions of dollars.

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are among those owed by FTX, according to the list of creditors filed in a U.S. court on Wednesday. He did not give details on the nature or the amount of the sums owed.

Swiss markets watchdog FINMA and Japanese regulator FSA were also included in the 116-page document.

A FINMA spokesperson said he could not explain why he was on the list of creditors. The watchdog was not a client of FTX and had not acted on its platforms, they added.

FinCEN and the IRS declined to comment. Japan’s FSA, contacted after hours, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A host of companies from traditional industries and the crypto sector, including Airbnb Inc and Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange and once a rival of FTX, were also named as creditors.

Airbnb and Binance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

FTX said last year that it owed its 50 largest creditors nearly $3.1 billion. US Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey in January allowed FTX to keep the names of 9 million of its individual customers secret for three months.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was accused of stealing billions of dollars from FTX clients to pay debts incurred by his crypto-focused hedge fund, has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges. He is to be tried in October.

(Reporting by Noele Illien in Zurich and Tom Wilson in London; editing by John Stonestreet, Kirsten Donovan)

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