- The army of professionals working with FTX billed $38 million in expenses for January.
- It includes hundreds of lawyers, consultants, accountants and others, according to CoinDesk.
Hundreds of lawyers, consultants, accountants and others working for FTX billed a total $38 million for the month of January alone, according to court records cited by CoinDesk.
Meanwhile, John Ray III, who took over as CEO in November and was previously responsible for helping clean up energy firm Enron, submitted a bill for $305,565 for the month of February, the report said.
The bankruptcy administrators for FTX — which was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and subsequently imploded in November in what many called crypto's Lehman moment — have retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell as counsel, as well as Quin Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Landis Rath & Cobb.
Those three firms have over 180 lawyers and over 50 other staffers working on the FTX case, per the CoinDesk report.
In addition, consulting firm AlixPartners has been brought aboard to investigate decentralized finance products and token analysis. Financial firms Alvarez & Marsal and Perella Weinberg Partners were retained for accounting purposes.
Sullivan & Cromwell billed 14,569 hours of work in January for a total of $16.8 million. The second-highest charge came from Alvarez & Marsal at $12.3 million, CoinDesk reported.
Meanwhile, FTX's trading arm sued Grayscale this week in a bid to claw back $250 million to repay customers.
The lawsuit marks the latest obstacle for Grayscale's owners DCG, the digital-asset focused venture capital firm founded by Barry Silbert. Its lending arm, Genesis Global Capital, filed for bankruptcy in January.