Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius misused investor and customer funds for years before its collapse, including to help its founders cash out tens of millions of dollars, a court-appointed examiner said in a new report.

The company founded by Alex Mashinsky promoted itself as an innovative, digital asset alternative to traditional banks, luring customers with interest rates as high as 17 per cent. But it used the money it received from thousands of everyday investors to inflate the price of its own token, CEL, in a scheme an employee described at the time as “very Ponzi like”, according to the report prepared by a law firm appointed by the US bankruptcy court.

Mashinsky himself profited by dumping $68.7mn of CEL, while telling the public he was not selling. Insider sales by Mashinsky and others, which were first reported in a Financial Times investigation in July, were enabled by Celsius buying up the token, using money from its customers and blue-chip investors including Laurence Tosi’s WestCap and the Canadian public pension Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ).

“We spent all our cash paying execs and trying to prop up Alex [Mashinsky]’s net worth in [the] CEL token,” a former employee told the examiner, according to the report.