John Ray III, the firefighter who was collected to suppress the FTX crisis

John Ray III built a 40-year career in which he took care of companies that were hit by epic explosions from Enron to Nortel Networks. But as a new boss of FTX, he may face his most difficult task so far.

ray took over the battered cryptocurrency exchange on November 11th at 4:30 a.m., when founder Sam Bankman-Fried took control in the middle of a bankruptcy-heavy bank run.

Since then, he has been working on the order in view of a global fire storm that led to the once acclaimed Bankman-Fried as a company of a company with a balance of $ 8 billion and was arrested because of fraud, she was asked whether she will ever be recovered.

"Think of John Ray in the streak of Red Adair," said James Bromley, lawyer for FTX at Sullivan & Cromwell, in allusion to the famous firefighter, who circled the globe to combat fires on oil sources.

ray, born in Massachusetts, had been trained as a lawyer and, in the 1990s, was the chief syndicus of the clothing manufacturer Fruit of the Loom. When the company went bankrupt in 1999, he received a crash course on how to collect the shards of a bankrupt company.

he founded his own consulting company, which specialized in untidy explosions, and ended up with such top -class companies as Nortel Networks, Overseas Shipholding Group and Residential Capital. But he made a name for Enron in the mid -2000s as a tactic and racket who wanted to reclaim money for plaintiffs from the fraudulent group.

The job at FTX not only requires a clever understanding of finances, accounting and law, but also the ability to make judgments every day that can rest in the middle of the cacophony. Then the basic tasks of finding and valuation of assets that can finally be assigned and distributed to the victims of the FTX can be continued.

The contrast between the 63-year-old Ray in a suit and his predecessor at FTX, which is known for his T-shirts, board shorts and a shrub made of curly hair, is strong.

ray carefully avoided all public judgments against Bankman-Fried and carefully chosen his words. And in contrast to Bankman-Fried, he mainly communicated his public thoughts in court files or via FTX lawyers.

Nevertheless, he was relentlessly in his descriptions of FTX.

In a testimony before the US Congress this week, Ray said that despite a career he spent "great and annoying corporate failure with allegations of criminal activities", he has never seen such a completely failure of corporate controls at all levels of an organization, the lack of annual financial statements to the complete failure of all internal controls or governance ".

Among his findings, Ray, who mostly worked from New York, could not even find out how much cash FTX had, and also found that a certain amount of FTX cryptocurrency had disappeared.

Of the information he was able to collect and checked, Ray tried to methodically organize her presentation. Among the 100 FTX subsidiaries that had registered bankruptcy in front of a federal court in Delaware, he told the judge that the extensive and intertwined companies could be distilled in four separate silos. He told the congress that he had five different goals in his job.

Bromley, who recruited Ray, recalled that he had met him years ago when the ENRON's dissolution, the notorious Texas energy dealer. As an emergency chief of Enron, Ray had aggressively processed Enron-Kontraher, including Bromley's client Lehman Brothers.

Enron believers believed that large Wall Street banks were the most important enables the company's Byzantine mailbox companies that made it easier to fraud. At first there was little hope that a lot could be done to get money back. Ultimately, however, Ray was able to use legal disputes as a means to win over comparisons with companies such as Citigroup and Lehman Brothers in billions.

The disputes at FTX were limited, but significant. The company endeavors to treat the names of its account holders who are his main believers confidentially. This has attracted the anger of the Office of the Us Trustee, which says that the step violates the spirit of transparency in procedures according to Chapter 11.

A competence dispute between Ray and the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried has settled the FTX command center, has already started. FTX Digital, a subsidiary that is not included in the US bankruptcy case, was adopted by a trio local liquidators who say that considerable FTX assets remain in the Bahama unit.

ray accused the authorities on the Bahamas of deducting FTX in the days of the application for bankruptcy in cooperation with Bankman-Fried Kryptocurrency.

Each page sharply criticized the procedure of the others. The Bahama authorities rejected Ray's claims, which in their opinion "do not seem to take care of facts, but only aim to make headlines and to promote questionable intentions".

For his fire extinguishing capabilities, Ray gets $ 1,300 an hour from FTX-even if he has to get up before sunrise.