Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital looking to buy back stake from FTX – CNBC

By Carolina Mandl

(Reuters) -SkyBridge Capital is working to buy back its stake from embattled crypto exchange FTX, the alternative investment firm’s founder Anthony Scaramucci said in an interview with CNBC on Friday.

“My legal team and my other partners are working to buy back that stake to take him off of our cap table,” he said, referring to Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder.

SkyBridge has no assets under custody at FTX, according to Scaramucci. “We thought that was a potential conflict of interest.”

Still, he said the firm has had to mark some assets down given the steep decline in cryptocurrencies prices.

In September, FTX announced it had bought a 30% stake in Scaramucci’s $2.2 billion firm, which manages over $800 million in digital-related assets.

Scaramucci said he went to the Bahamas on Tuesday to meet Bankman-Fried and try to help rescue the crypto exchange. He left in the afternoon, after realizing there was not much he could do. “Perhaps there was more going on than it being a rescue situation.”

(Reporting by Carolina Mandl, in New York, additional reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)