Ryan Salame pleaded guilty to tens of millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations to boost causes supported by his boss.
Ryan Salame, former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamas subsidiary and top lieutenant of the failed cryptocurrency exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to 90 months in prison, US federal prosecutors said.
Salame pleaded guilty in September to making tens of millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations to boost causes supported by his boss. His sentence of seven and a half years in prison, announced on Tuesday, was longer than the five to seven years requested by prosecutors.
Bankman-Fried was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison for stealing $8 billion from FTX clients. A jury found him guilty in November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy stemming from the 2022 collapse of FTX, which prosecutors called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. Bankman-Fried appealed the conviction and sentence.
Prosecutors say Salame, Bankman-Fried and former FTX engineering chief Nishad Singh used FTX client funds to donate to political candidates who support crypto-friendly legislation.
Salame’s lawyers tried to distance him from the FTX fraud. “He was deceived, like everyone else, into believing that the companies were legitimate, solvent and extremely profitable,” they stated in a document presented in early May, before the sentence.
In addition to the prison sentence, Salame, 30, was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $6 million in forfeiture and more than $5 million in restitution, prosecutors said in a statement.
“Salami’s involvement in two serious federal crimes undermined public confidence in American elections and the integrity of the financial system,” said Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Salame donated more than $24 million to Republican candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission data, making him one of that year’s top donors.
He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to make illegal political contributions and one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.
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