Temasek cuts staff pay after failed investment in crypto exchange

SINGAPORE: The state-owned investment fund Temasek Holdings said it has cut the pay of staff responsible for its investment in cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which collapsed last year.

Last year, the fund wrote off all of the $275 million it invested in FTX, the media reported.

Prosecutors have accused FTX’s former chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried of orchestrating an “epic” fraud which may cost investors billions of dollars.

Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“The investment team and senior management, who are ultimately responsible for the investment decisions made, took collective accountability and had their compensation reduced,” Temasek said in a statement on Monday.

The sovereign wealth fund also said it was “disappointed with the outcome of our investment, and the negative impact on our reputation”, it was reported.

Temasek did not indicate how much salaries were reduced by.

It had invested $210 million and then another $65 million in FTX in two funding rounds between October 2021 and January 2022.

As of March 2022, Temasek was worth more than $298.1 billion, so the money it had put into the cryptocurrency platform accounted for a small percentage of its investments.

However, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said in December that Temasek’s losses in FTX had caused damage to the fund’s reputation, as per the report.

“The fact that other leading global institutional investors like BlackRock and Sequoia Capital also invested in FTX does not mitigate this,” added Wong, who is also the country’s Finance Minister.