On September 29, 2023, Su Zhu, co-founder of the collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, was arrested at Singapore's Changi Airport while attempting to leave the country, in a dramatic turn in one of the largest failures in crypto history. The fund's joint liquidator, Teneo, had secured a committal order from the Singapore courts four days earlier, sentencing Zhu to four months in prison for his deliberate failure to comply with a court order compelling him to cooperate with the liquidation investigation and account for his activities as a founder.
Three Arrows Capital, once estimated to manage around US$10 billion in assets, had imploded in mid-2022 after the collapse of the Terra-LUNA ecosystem triggered a brutal crypto sell-off. The fund, heavily leveraged on long crypto positions and borrowing, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in New York in July 2022, leaving creditors with claims of around US$3.5 billion. In the months that followed, Zhu and his co-founder Kyle Davies largely evaded the liquidators while remaining conspicuously active on social media, prompting Teneo to accuse them of refusing to engage meaningfully with the process. Teneo later sought US$1.3 billion from the founders, alleging they had taken on additional debt even when the fund was already insolvent.
The committal order applied equally to Davies, but his whereabouts were unknown at the time of Zhu's arrest. During Zhu's imprisonment, the liquidators sought to press him for information to aid asset recovery. The arrest was not Zhu's only brush with the authorities: on September 13, 2023, the Monetary Authority of Singapore had issued prohibition orders barring both Zhu and Davies from conducting regulated investment activity for nine years.
The saga did not end at the prison gates. Even as the liquidation ground on, Zhu and Davies launched a new crypto venture, OPNX, a platform for trading tokenised bankruptcy claims, which was fined US$2.8 million by Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority in August 2023. The Three Arrows collapse, alongside the failures of Celsius, Voyager and FTX, became emblematic of the excesses of the 2021 crypto boom. Zhu's arrest at Changi, carried out as he tried to board a flight out of Singapore, provided the episode with an image as indelible as any in the industry's short history: a billionaire fund manager, once courted by the biggest names in finance, taken into custody at the airport.
The liquidators' pursuit of the founders' personal wealth extended well beyond the committal orders. Teneo secured a global freeze on assets worth US$1.14 billion belonging to Zhu, Davies and Davies' wife Kelly Chen, as it chased creditor claims of about US$3.3 billion. The founders' property portfolios came under intense scrutiny: Zhu's wife, Evelyn Tao Yaqiong, sold a Dalvey Road mansion near the Singapore Botanic Gardens for S$38.5 million in 2024, having bought it for S$28.5 million in 2020, completing the sale despite the court-ordered freeze. Another Good Class Bungalow on Yarwood Avenue, bought for S$48.8 million in late 2021, was converted by Tao into an urban farm growing vegetables, herbs and fruit, and used as the research base for a company she co-founded. Each new revelation about the founders' lifestyles, from luxury bungalows to the Dubai villa that liquidators would later pursue, deepened creditors' anger at men they accused of living large while their fund collapsed.