Three Arrows Founders Have One Week to Provide Key Financial Documents

https://decrypt.co/116249/three-arrows-documents-singapore-court

The co-founders of defunct crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, reemerged recently on Twitter and in media interviews with no shortage of opinions about the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.

But neither they nor their Singapore-based legal team have been cooperating with requests for documents related to their firm’s liquidation.

The High Court of the Republic of Singapore has ordered Three Arrows Capital and its co-founders to submit affidavits outlining their dealings with the company.

The Singapore high court officially recognized the liquidation order filed in the British Virgin Islands, meaning that Teneo, the court-appointed liquidator, can request Singapore financial records for the company and its co-founders.

That’s why the information in those affidavits could be critical for liquidators, who have been working to locate funds and figure out how to settle claims with creditors.

Three Arrows took a $200 million blow when TerraUSD (UST), Terraform Lab’s algorithmic stablecoin, lost its one-to-one peg with the dollar and wiped out $40 billion in investor funds over a few days in early May. As rumors began to circulate about the embattled hedge fund, crypto exchanges BitMEX, FTX, and Deribit liquidated the firm’s positions when it couldn’t meet margin calls, or add collateral to secure the outstanding balances on its loans.

The final blow came when crypto lending company Voyager Digital, itself now bankrupt, revealed Three Arrows owed it $661 million, and issued a formal notice of default. Two days later, the firm was ordered to liquidate by a court in the British Virgin Islands.

The Singapore court order, submitted on Wednesday, comes a week after an attempt to obtain documents went unanswered by Solitaire, one of the Singapore-based law firms representing Three Arrows Capital, also known as 3AC.

“This is a curious position given your previous correspondence wherein your client volunteered to provide information to our clients on a rolling basis (without specifying what such information would be),” WongPartnership law firm wrote in the letter to Solitaire, demanding that they produce documents by November 23.

Russel Crumpler and Christopher Farmer, the 3AC foreign representatives in the firm’s bankruptcy proceedings, submitted the order to the Southern District of New York bankruptcy court docket on Thursday.

In the past couple weeks, Davies has appeared on CNBC, saying that he’s in Bali and has been cooperating with the liquidators, and then going on to allege that FTX and Alameda Research, a trading firm also founded by Bankman-Fried, “colluded to trade against clients.” It’s not an unfamiliar allegation.

In a court filing in mid-November, newly appointed FTX CEO John J Ray (who also oversaw the liquidation of Enron) claimed that Alameda had “secret exemptions” from standard liquidation protocols on FTX, meaning that the firm could trade against FTX users with an unfair advantage.

Zhu has been a little less direct, reposting allegations against FTX and Alameda on his Twitter account and speaking to a reporter in Abu Dhabi last week.

“Some industry leaders have said the FTX collapse set the industry back by five years,” he told Bloomberg. “I think it’s even longer than that—seven or eight years—maybe even longer, if the underlying issues aren’t solved.”