- Ryan Salame has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to election fraud and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business
- The sentence for the former FTX exec exceeds the maximum called for by the prosecution
- Salame forfeited $1.55 billion in assets, including cash, properties, restaurants, and a Porsche 911, following his guilty plea
Former FTX executive Ryan Salame has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for his indiscretions while working at FTX. Salame pleaded guilty to charges of election fraud and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business during his tenure at the cryptocurrency exchange, a decision that prevented his term from being more than a decade. The 30-year-old was among four former high-ranking FTX managers who pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges after the company’s collapse in late 2022, but unlike the other three, Salame did not agree to testify for the prosecution at the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried.
Salame Pleaded Guilty in August
Salame was co-chief executive of FTX alongside Sam Bankman-Fried, but he has kept a far lower profile since the exchange collapsed in November 2022. Salame was revealed last August to be negotiating a guilty plea over charges including violations of campaign finance laws, which prosecutors labeled “one of the largest-ever in American history” as well as the operation of an unlicensed money-transmitting business.
Salame pleaded guilty a month later, agreeing to forfeit a staggering $1.55 billion in assets, including a $6 million cash payment, two Massachusetts properties, four restaurants, and a Porche 911. Bankruptcy filings also revealed loans of $55 million from Bankman-Fried’s companies to Salame.
More to Come
The former executive was warned at the time that he faced up to a decade behind bars, and prosecutors sought a seven-year jail term in a pre-sentence filing, describing the campaign finance offense, which involved more than 300 individual political donations, as “one of the largest-ever in American history.” His 90-month sentence therefore exceeds even their toughest recomendation.
Salame’s lawyers, who had requested a sentence of no more than 18 months, argued that 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,” emphasizing that he was “not part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s innermost circle.”
