Silicon Valley Bank customers who saw their Cayman Islands deposits wiped down to zero have won a court ruling that could help them get their money back, the Wall Street Journal reported. A Cayman Islands court on Thursday approved a petition to wind up the local branch of SVB, according to Paul Kennedy, a partner at law firm Campbells, who filed the petition and attended the hearing. The petition was filed June 13 on behalf of SVB customers who collectively had around $38 million in deposits before the bank collapsed in March. That money was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which guaranteed the bank’s deposits held inside the U.S. but not those outside the country. SVB’s customers in the Cayman Islands checked their deposit balances one morning and saw they had been wiped down to zero. These customers are still expected to pay back loans they had taken from SVB, since they are now owned by First Citizens BancShares, a large U.S. regional bank that bought SVB’s loans in late March. The money they had earmarked to repay the debt is in the Cayman bank accounts, the customers said.
