POLICE in the Bahamas, a tax haven where the troubled cryptocurrency platform FTX has its headquarters, said yesterday they are investigating the company.

FTX announced on Friday it had filed for protection from creditors under US bankruptcy law, the latest twist in a saga that reverberated across the digital currency landscape.

“In light of the collapse of FTX globally and the provisional liquidation of FTX Digital Markets Ltd., a team of financial investigators from the Financial Crimes Investigation Branch are working closely with the Bahamas Security Commission to investigate if any criminal misconduct occurred,” the Bahamas police said in a statement published on Facebook.

On the same day that FTX filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, its founder and chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, age 30, resigned.

On Saturday, the new chief executive, John Ray, said the company was making “every effort to secure all assets” following unauthorised transactions potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

FTX officials did not detail the quantity of unauthorised transactions made, but cryptocurrency analysis firm Elliptic said in a report published Saturday that “US$477 million (RM2.2 billion) is suspected to have been stolen.”

More than “US$663 million in various tokens” had been drained from FTX’s wallets only 24 hours after it filed for bankruptcy, Elliptic said, with the difference “believed to have been moved into secure storage by FTX themselves.”

FTX US and FTX.com “continue to make every effort to secure all assets, wherever located,” Ray said, who specialises in corporate turnarounds.

As recently as 10 days ago, FTX was considered the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency platform, at one point valued at US$32 billion.

Its rival Binance agreed to acquire FTX last week but pulled out a day later. – AFP, November 14, 2022.