A New York oil dynasty that was a client of the legendary fraudster Bernard Madoff and lost billions in the demise of Enron has been embroiled in the collapse of FTX, according to court documents.
Investment firms for the Belfer family, whose name sits above galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, were included in a list of shareholders of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its US business that were released in court documents this week.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been accused by US prosecutors of orchestrating “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”, drawing comparisons to the Ponzi scheme architect Madoff and sprawling bankruptcy of Enron, which sank amid fraud allegations. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty.
The Belfer family, one of Enron’s largest shareholders, lost around $2bn in the company’s collapse, according to estimates at the time. The family’s patriarch, Robert Belfer, played a high-profile role as a long-serving member of Enron’s board of directors for several decades until 2002. Several family foundations and companies also invested with Madoff’s sham investment firm.
A representative for Belfer’s family office, Belfer Management, run by Robert’s son Laurence Belfer, said the family does not give interviews and declined to comment. Robert Belfer said in 2011: “Needless to say, Enron was a painful experience” and that the financial losses had forced the family to reduce the scale of its…
