Temasek to Slash Compensation of Team That Greenlit FTX Investment

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Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek said that it will slash the compensation of the investment team and senior management involved in greenlighting the US$275 million funding in now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

Temasek’s chairman Lim Boon Heng said in a statement on following an internal review that the move was its way of taking “collective accountability” even though there was no misconduct by the investment team in reaching their recommendation.

He added,

“With FTX, as alleged by prosecutors and as admitted by key executives at FTX and its affiliates, there was fraudulent conduct intentionally hidden from investors, including Temasek. Nevertheless, we are disappointed with the outcome of our investment, and the negative impact on our reputation.”

The investor had poured in US$210 million for a minority stake of ~1% in FTX International, and another US$65 million for a minority stake of ~1.5% in FTX US, across 2 funding rounds from October 2021 to January 2022.

This was reportedly done following an “extensive due diligence process on FTX” which took approximately 8 months.

Initially, Temasek had attempted to distance itself from the FTX fallout by stating that it did not have a board seat since it held only a minority stake of less than 1% in the crypto exchange.

Lawrence Wong, Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) and Minister for Finance, and Deputy Chairman of MAS had chimed in on the matter saying that the incident had caused “reputational damage” to Temasek.