By: Mario Mancini
A New York oil baron who lost billions in the collapse of Enron and who also invested tens of millions in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme has also taken a hit in the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX, according to a NY Post report.
Robert Belfer, 87, whose family has made several philanthropic donations to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as Harvard University and Yeshiva University, was listed in court documents as a shareholder of FTX, according to the Financial Times.
Belfer is the son of American oil industry executive and multimillionaire Arthur Belfer, who founded the Belco Petroleum Corporation and transformed it into a Fortune 500 company. He was born in Kraków, Poland in 1935 and graduated from Columbia College in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1958.
After completing law school, Belfer joined the Belco Petroleum Corp. He was elected president in 1960 and was named its chairman in 1985. The company subsequently merged into one of the predecessors of Enron Corp, the Omaha, Nebraska-based InterNorth, Inc., and the Belfer family received a sizeable equity stake in the transaction, eventually becoming Enron’s largest shareholder.
What the family received was a special class of stock by which each share could be convertible into 27 common shares and paid big dividends. Belfer served the board of directors of Enron and was estimated to have held over 16 million Enron shares as of August, 2000.
However, he was reported to be reticent on the board and was not involved in the operations of the company. He resigned from the board in June, 2002.
His shares earned him a spot on the Forbes 400. However, after the collapse of stock prices following the Enron scandal, the Belfer family holdings, valued at $661 million at the peak stock price of August 2000, were valued at just $6.3 million in 2001. The preferred shares he and his family owned in Enron would have been worth as much as $1.4 billion, according to analysts. Nevertheless, prior to the Enron collapse, he had diversified into New York City real estate and founded a second energy company, Belco Oil & Gas Corp., in 1992.
The company went public in 1996 through Goldman Sachs, raising more than $100 million.] It was acquired by a Denver-based oil company in 2001.
Ariel Zilber of The New York Post writes that, “after the fall of Enron, the Belfer family withdrew more than $28 million from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Irving Picard, the trustee who was in charge of liquidating Madoff’s assets and recovering victims’ funds, filed suit against the Belfers in an effort to claw back their gains, according to court documents.
It is unclear how the lawsuit was settled. The Belfers have declined to comment to The New York Post.
