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Former FTX executive Ryan Salame has been sentenced to 7.5 years in prison after pleading guilty last year to election fraud charges and conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business while working at Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange.
Salame, 30, was one of four former high-ranking FTX managers to plead guilty to federal criminal charges after the company’s collapse in late 2022, alongside Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang. However, unlike the other three, Salame did not agree to testify for the prosecution at the trial of Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder and former chief executive.
In March, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years after being convicted of stealing billions of dollars from FTX customers and investors in order to make risky bets.
Salame initially joined FTX’s affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research in 2019, before being made co-chief executive of FTX’s Bahamian affiliate.
He acted as a straw donor to help FTX contribute more than $100mn to US political campaigns, largely ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, giving money to candidates from both major political parties to help Bankman-Fried curry favour.
Salame previously admitted the donations were “funded by transfers from an Alameda subsidiary”. While categorised as loans, he said he “never intended to repay them”.
Salame met on multiple occasions with senior politicians in Washington, including Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and then-Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy.
Prosecutors, who sought a seven-year sentence for Salame, said the campaign finance offence — which included more than 300 individual political donations — amounted to “one of the largest-ever in American history”.
Lawyers for Salame, who had sought a sentence of no more than 18 months, said the discovery in November 2022 that FTX may have stolen billions from customers “was as shocking and dismaying to Ryan Salame as to everyone else in the world” and emphasised he was “not part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s innermost circle”.
Damian Williams, the US attorney in Manhattan whose office brought the case, said Salame’s crimes “helped FTX grow faster and larger by operating outside of the law” and “undermined public trust in American elections and the integrity of the financial system”.
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