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Salame, former FTX executive, sentenced to 7.5 years in prison in the United States | Cryptocurrency News
Ryan Salame pleaded guilty to tens of millions of dollars in illegal donations to support causes supported by his boss.
Ryan Salame, former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamian branch and lieutenant of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been sentenced to 90 months in prison, US federal prosecutors said.
Salame pleaded guilty in September to making tens of millions of dollars in illegal donations to support causes supported by his boss. His seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence, announced Tuesday, was longer than the five to seven years prosecutors had sought.
Bankman-Fried was convicted 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 FTX’s 2022 collapse, which prosecutors called one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history. Bankman-Fried appealed his conviction and sentence.
Prosecutors allege that Salame, Bankman-Fried and former FTX technical chief Nishad Singh used FTX client funds to make donations to political candidates in support of crypto-friendly legislation.
Salame’s lawyers tried to distance him from the FTX fraud. “He was led, like everyone else, to believe that the companies were legitimate, solvent and extremely profitable,” they said in a document in early May before the ruling.
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.
“Salame’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 the top donors that year.
He had pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to make illegal political contributions and one charge of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transfer business.