Plc and London-based hedge fund Fidera Ltd are among dozens of creditors seeking to recover money they say they’re owed by Dubai’s United Arab Emirates Exchange Center LLC — a collapsed remittance provider with an estimated $1 billion hole in its balance sheet.

Thirty-six creditors have lodged their claims with the court-appointed trustee overseeing the firm’s bankruptcy, according to a report seen by Bloomberg News. As well as Barclays and Fidera, they include Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Bank of Baroda.

The process kicked off last year when a Fidera-linked company filed for bankruptcy proceedings against UAE Exchange, part of the now-defunct UK fintech group Finablr. A Dubai appeals court upheld the proceedings in a hearing on Wednesday.

The bankruptcy trustee hasn’t disclosed the total value of the claims and has asked the court for more time to verify them, according to the report seen by Bloomberg News. Fidera says it’s owed around $90 million, according to a court judgment in July that declared UAE Exchange insolvent.

Spokespeople for Fidera and Barclays declined to comment. UAE Exchange, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Bank of Baroda didn’t respond to requests to comment.

Fidera’s claim goes back to a 2016 credit facility provided to UAE Exchange and its parent UX Holdings by a syndicate of banks that included Goldman Sachs International. Goldman later assigned its rights under the facility to Rejira S.à r.l., the Luxembourg-based company connected to Fidera that filed the bankruptcy claim last year.

Prior to Finablr’s collapse in 2020, UAE Exchange was one of the group’s largest businesses, alongside currency-exchange firm Travelex Holdings Ltd.

The group, founded by Indian businessman B.R. Shetty, suffered a crisis of confidence after short seller Muddy Waters targeted another of his businesses — hospital operator NMC Health Plc — in late 2019. The fallout left Finablr short of the cash it needed to keep processing payments, and UAE Exchange halted transactions in March 2020.

As Finablr unraveled with about $1.3 billion of debt, Travelex was restructured by its lenders. Meanwhile, Global Fintech Investments Holding — an affiliate of Swiss-based Prism Group, which had formed a consortium with Abu Dhabi-based investment firm Royal Strategic Partners — agreed to acquire Finablr’s remaining business for $1.

The deal was intended to pave the way for a restructuring of the group’s debts, according to Finablr’s announcement at the time. But the proposed transfer of UAE Exchange itself was never completed after the buyers failed to obtain the necessary regulatory approvals, according to a report prepared for the court proceedings.

Instead, the firm remained under the supervision of the UAE Central Bank, which had intervened in 2020 as the company’s financial problems mounted. Separately, Prism and Royal Strategic Partners launched Wizz Financial, which they described in 2021 as a platform for consolidating Finablr and other remittance businesses.

The central bank didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. Representatives of Prism, Royal Strategic Partners and Wizz Financial did not respond to requests for comment.

Now, court filings show how little remains of UAE Exchange itself.

The company has no employees, no license or operations, and insufficient funds to pay for a restructuring, according to a Dubai court judgment handed down in July. Nor has it produced any evidence of external investments or an ability to meet its obligations, the judgment shows.

UAE Exchange’s latest audited accounts date to 2018, and no financial data was provided from 2019 onward, according to the report seen by Bloomberg. But an external assessment estimated its net assets at roughly negative AED 3.8 billion ($1.03 billion) in 2025, according to the report. That compares with positive net assets of AED 828 million at the end of 2018.

The bankruptcy proceedings are expected to determine how much creditors can recover, and could shed light on what happened to UAE Exchange during the years its ownership remained unresolved.

In a document submitted for the proceedings, Global Fintech Investments Holding said it had been in contact with UAE Exchange’s main creditors and the UAE Central Bank over customer and creditor claims. It said the majority of lenders had agreed to a proposed settlement, but the process could not proceed without the approval of all lenders, according to the report seen by Bloomberg News.

Rejira told the court-appointed expert that after acquiring the debt in 2021, it tried to contact representatives of the creditor group who were themselves in touch with the prospective buyers in an effort to settle the debt, but that “all attempts failed,” the report shows.