OTTAWA — Now that the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX is asking for the money its executives gave in political and other donations to be returned, Canada’s largest university is preparing to give back nearly US$500,000.

“The University of Toronto is in the process of returning the funds in full,” the institution’s public-relations department said in an emailed statement Wednesday.

Two other Ontario universities, Western University in London and the University of Ottawa, did not say whether they still intended to keep grants pledged to their researchers. The Logic first reported on the grants in November 2022, after FTX’s spectacular collapse.

The FTX Future Fund, part of the larger FTX Foundation, has gone offline, but last September its website said it had made grants and investments totalling US$160 million. The foundation was the charitable arm of the rococo FTX empire, with overlap among its board and leadership at FTX and the trading company Alameda (whose access to customer funds on the FTX exchange is at the core of FTX’s implosion).

The researchers at the three Canadian universities were among the recipients of FTX Foundation money, each for amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The University of Toronto’s Social Science Prediction Platform, which aims to collect and track academics’ forecasts of the effects of new social programs, got the most, a US$492,119 grant listed in June 2022. Economics professor Eva Vivalt is one of the lead researchers on the project.

Western’s Joshua Pearce, an engineering professor, got US$150,000 in support of a project on resilient food sources; Ottawa’s Emilio Alarcon, a biochemist, was promised US$250,000 for research on germ-killing plastics. (In November, the University of Ottawa refused to say whether Alarcon had that money in hand.)

In November, Western University said the school was monitoring the situation, but had received no “claims related to FTX Foundation, Inc., or this funding.”

Neither Pearce nor Alarcon, nor their universities, answered The Logic’s inquiries this week about whether they’ve returned money or are now planning to.

FTX’s new management under the windup-specialist John J. Ray III released a statement Sunday saying that repayment calls were going out to “political figures, political action funds, and other recipients of contributions or other payments” from FTX, its affiliates or executives. Ray is famous for his vigour in recovering money for creditors of bankrupt companies, including Enron and Nortel.

“These recipients are requested to return such funds to the FTX debtors by February 28, 2023,” the statement said.

The Sunday announcement followed a somewhat gentler statement in December, giving an email address that recipients eager to return money to FTX could write to for further instructions.

In November, U of T told The Logic it would meet any obligations resulting from its dealings with FTX. At the time, the FTX empire was in bankruptcy; Ray and his team were alarmed by what they’d found, but they were just starting to pick through the rubble.

Since then, FTX’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges. But in December, former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and former FTX executive Gary Wang each pleaded guilty to fraud and similar criminal counts, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has announced they’re cooperating with the SEC’s investigation into their “scheme to deceive FTX’s investors.”