Deloitte’s role in the collapse of Mars FX is facing a new line of scrutiny after a US bankruptcy judge authorised representatives of the fund to seek documents from and examine Deloitte in the Cayman Islands.
On 3 August, the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York authorised the foreign representatives of Mars FX Master Ltd to issue subpoenas for documents and examine Deloitte & Touche in the Cayman Islands. The order followed a motion filed on 31 July under Rule 2004 of the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure.
The order is not a finding of wrongdoing against Deloitte. But it brings Deloitte directly into the insolvency investigation at a time when it is already facing investor litigation over the Mars FX audits.
That Delaware litigation began in March. Cohen New York Inc., an investor in Mars FX US LP, sued the fund’s general partner Novus Capital Partners, four Novus managers and Deloitte & Touche LLP.
The allegations against Deloitte centre on four years of audit opinions.
According to the complaint, Deloitte served as auditor of Mars FX US LP and the Master Fund from inception through the 2023 financial year and issued unqualified audit opinions for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Over that period, the complaint says, the fund’s reported assets increased from $19 million to $384 million.
The plaintiff alleges that virtually all of those assets were classified as “Cash with broker” held through Tech RealFX Ltd, or TRFX.
The lawsuit alleges that Deloitte issued its clean opinions without independently verifying assets held by the technology partner. The complaint says the balance-confirmation process ran through TRFX, while the underlying brokerage accounts were held in TRFX’s name rather than the Master Fund’s.
The complaint also points to a change in the way TRFX was described in the audited financial statements. It alleges that Deloitte changed its description of TRFX from a British Virgin Islands “regulated entity” to simply a British Virgin Islands entity.
Meanwhile, the documents being provided to investors had also changed.
According to the complaint, offering documents used when Cohen invested in 2022 represented that the technology partner was regulated by the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission and that fund accounts were maintained in the Master Fund’s name.
Revised documents executed in February 2024 instead stated that the technology partner was not regulated or routinely inspected by a government regulator; that accounts could be held in the name of the technology partner or its affiliates; that it was not required to segregate the Master Fund’s trading positions from its own assets; and that the general partner had not independently investigated its compliance with local law.
The complaint alleges that Deloitte delivered its audit of the 2023 financial statements about three months later and reported no subsequent events requiring disclosure.
Mars FX’s May 2023 marketing material named Deloitte & Touche LLP as auditor, reported an annualised net return of 18.2% and a 0.0% maximum drawdown, and stated that the 2020, 2021 and 2022 performance periods had been audited.
The same document said no trading had occurred in November 2022 because of a required system upgrade. That detail became significant later.
The Delaware complaint says that in November 2025, TRFX filed a defence in related British Virgin Islands proceedings asserting that its trading platform had ceased operating in October 2022.
Cohen alleges that Deloitte aided and abetted breaches of fiduciary duty by Novus and its principals and failed to identify, or ignored, what the lawsuit describes as multiple fraud-risk factors.
The complaint says the Master Fund requested redemption of approximately $597 million from TRFX in November 2024 and that TRFX refused. In June 2025, Mars FX Master Ltd, Mars FX US LP and Mars FX International Ltd then brought a separate BVI claim against TRFX for roughly $598 million. Bloomberg reported that Mars said the claim comprised about $277 million invested plus claimed trading profits.
A separate regulatory filing provides another measure of the size of the US fund. A February 2024 Form D amendment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission reported that Mars FX US LP had sold $331,079,082 of fund interests to 426 investors.
The structure eventually moved into insolvency proceedings. Mars FX US LP filed for Chapter 11 protection in March 2026, while foreign representatives of Mars FX Master Ltd and Mars FX International Ltd sought US recognition of Cayman Islands proceedings.
By April, Bloomberg reported that the liquidators were already investigating potential breach-of-contract claims against Deloitte concerning the 2022 and 2023 audits.
The Delaware lawsuit goes further. Cohen alleges that Deloitte aided and abetted breaches of fiduciary duty by Novus and its principals and failed to respond appropriately to what the plaintiff characterises as multiple fraud-risk factors.
Those allegations have not been established in court. The August subpoena order likewise does not establish that Deloitte committed any wrongdoing.
But the two proceedings now place the audit work under scrutiny from different directions: an investor is challenging what Deloitte did before issuing four consecutive unqualified opinions, while the insolvency representatives trying to reconstruct what happened to the Mars FX assets are seeking Deloitte records themselves.
That makes the central audit question difficult to avoid: what evidence did Deloitte obtain to satisfy itself that the assets underlying those four clean opinions actually existed?
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About the author: Claudine Cassar is the founder and editor of Big4News, covering audit, consulting, regulation and governance across Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.