SBF's Top FTX Executive Ryan Salame Sentenced to Nearly 8 Years in Prison

Ryan Salame, one of Sam Bankman-Fried's top deputies at FTX, was sentenced to nearly eight years in prison, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Salame, who was co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, the company's Bahamas-based subsidiary, pleaded guilty in September to making tens of millions of dollars in illegal donations during campaigns to support causes Bankman supported -Fried.

His lawyers sought the minimum sentence of 18 months before Judge Lewis A. Kaplan decided on the 90-month sentence in Manhattan federal court.

American probation officials had recommended an even harsher sentence of 10 years in prison.

“Salame’s involvement in two serious federal crimes undermined public confidence in U.S. elections and the integrity of the financial system,” said Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Salame, 30, has not cooperated in the federal lawsuit against Bankman-Fried, despite turning over nearly 600,000 pages of documents to authorities.

Salame's lawyers pointed out that he was the first FTX executive to alert Bahamian authorities of potential fraud as early as late 2022, days before the company filed for bankruptcy.

Bankman-Fried was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison for stealing $8 billion from FTX customers. A jury convicted him in November of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy stemming from the 2022 collapse of FTX, which prosecutors called one of the largest financial frauds in state history -United.

Prosecutors allege that Salame, Bankman-Fried, and former FTX head of engineering Nishad Singh used FTX client funds to donate to political candidates supporting pro-crypto legislation.

In addition to the prison term, Salame 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 Tuesday.

Salame, who could not immediately be reached for comment, has 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 the main donors of that year.

He had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to make illegal political contributions and one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Salame's lawyers claimed he was “tricked, like everyone else, into believing that the companies were legitimate, solvent and extremely profitable,” according to a memo filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Kaplan's sentence could be an indicator of how harshly he will crack down on FTX executives who cooperated with federal investigators in exchange for more lenient pleas in court.

Bankman-Fried's on-and-off girlfriend Caroline Ellison, Singh and Gary Wang will be sentenced later this year.

All three pleaded guilty to financial crimes and agreed to testify against Bankman-Fried in court. They are expected to be sentenced later this year.

Bankman-Fried had used FTX client funds to make more than $100 million in political contributions ahead of the 2022 elections – mostly to Democrats – and to purchase a luxury $40 million penthouse in the Bahamas where he and his colleagues lived and worked, prosecutors said.

Salame joined Alameda in 2019, two years after it was founded by Bankman-Fried, and became co-CEO of FTX's Bahamian subsidiary in late 2021.

He worked for Ernst & Young and Circle Internet Financial before joining FTX Digital Markets.

While in Alameda, Salame said he used the fund's bank accounts to help FTX clients transfer fiat currency to the exchange, even though neither company was licensed as a money services business, as required by law.