It’s a stunning fall for Tiger Management, the once high-flying graduate of hedge fund pioneer Julian Robertson. Hwang, now 60, turned to gambling on behalf of his own family office Archegos and amassed a fortune that was once worth $30 billion, according to Bloomberg.

According to his legal team, his estimated net worth has now dropped to just $55.3 million at best, with the potential resulting liabilities reducing that even further.

“The government’s request for a sweeping restitution order is unsupported, unnecessary, and unwarranted,” Hwang’s attorneys argued in a filing with a U.S. district court representing the Southern District of New York. “The court may not order restitution at all.”

Hwang’s victims consist of a handful of elite multinational investment banks, led mainly by Credit Suisse and Nomura. The combined damages for the last two alone amount to three-quarters of the $9.86 billion in restitution federal prosecutors are seeking.

Prime brokers across Wall Street that service high rollers such as hedge funds and family offices had lent heavily to Archegos. Hwang’s company used the borrowed money to double down on a long position in ViacomCBS at the height of the COVID lockdown-era streaming bubble.

Reportedly too complex to analyze which damage was Hwang’s fault

The purchases were so prolific that Hwang inadvertently caused his own financial ruin when the media company saw the rising stock price as a golden opportunity to issue new shares that could finance the high costs of content production.

Lawyers for Hwang argued that the damage was only partly to blame for Hwang’s actions. Isolating his specific contribution from that of Chief Risk Officer Scott Becker, who testified that he lied to lenders independently of his boss, for example, could prove too complex.

“Determining the amount of each victim’s actual compensable loss would, at a minimum, require this court to distinguish between categories of losses attributable to Mr. Hwang, others at Archegos such as Mr. Becker, and the own independent behavior and the decisions of the victims. ,” they wrote, citing the banks were responsible for their own decisions about how to hedge their exposure to Hwang and when to liquidate it.

If Wall Street wants its billions back, lenders should consider taking on the U.S. government, his lawyers suggested.

That’s because the state is demanding to confiscate for itself $12.4 billion as criminal punishment from ill-gotten gains from its market manipulation. That is, if the court allows it, as Hwang’s legal team is also challenging this forfeiture.

Wall Street should ask Uncle Sam for refunds instead

“The victims would remain free to seek damages directly from the government under the forfeiture and disgorgement process, under which the victims would be able to obtain a share of any forfeiture judgment this court imposes,” they continued, “to the extent court orders forfeiture altogether.”

Hwang’s lawyers counter this, while Archegos may have done so won due to his deception, Hwang himself did not, strictly speaking, do so take possession of these profits for his own personal gain – rather than plowing this money back into the market to support his trading positions.

Because the government did not meet the legal bar required to seize the $12.4 billion in assets, the court should not grant forfeiture, they argued.

Hwang is facing the prospect of potentially spending the rest of his life behind bars after a federal jury in Manhattan found him guilty of multiple counts of fraud. The jury found that the Wall Street banks had been misled and would not have kept his plan going if they had been informed of the level of risk Archegos had taken to finance his speculation.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams is currently seeking a maximum prison sentence of 21 years. Fortune contacted his office but could not reach a spokesperson for a response.