Former FTX exec Ryan Salame to surrender assets including Porsche after guilty plea

Former FTX executive Ryan Salame pleaded guilty on Thursday and was released on a $1 million bond, according to Inner City Press.

Salame is the fourth person now to plead guilty to charges related to the crypto exchange FTX's collapse last year as former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried awaits his criminal trial next month. 

Salame pleaded guilty to conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions, as well as conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business in a New York federal court on Thursday afternoon. He told Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York he made $10 million in political contributions and called them loans, according to Inner City Press. 

Bloomberg News first reported that Salame was planning to plead guilty to the criminal charges. He also agreed to surrender $1.6 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg.  

Salame also has to give up two properties and a Porsche, according to Inner City Press. 

"Ryan Salame agreed to advance the interests of FTX, Alameda Research, and his co-conspirators through an unlawful political influence campaign and through an unlicensed money transmitting business, which helped FTX grow faster and larger by operating outside of the law," said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. 

Prosecutors said Salame and co-conspirators made over 300 political donations in the "tens of millions of dollars," which was unlawful because they were made it the name of a straw donor or with corporate funds. A straw donor is someone who illegally uses someone else's money to make a political contribution in their own name. 

"In dozens of instances, use of straw donors allowed Samuel Bank.man-Fried, a/k/a 'SBF,' to evade contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom Bank.man-Fried had already donated," prosecutors said. 

Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, FTX Co-Founder Gary Wang and FTX's former Engineering Director Nishad Singh have all pleaded guilty over the past several months.

And that makes four

The former co-chief executive officer of FTX Digital Markets was probed in July over possible campaign finance violations, according to the Wall Street Journal. At the time, federal prosecutors were investigating Salame's involvement in girlfriend’s Michelle Bond's 2022 New York congressional race for a Republican seat. 

Salame has said he does not plan to testify at former FTX CEO Bankman-Fried's criminal trial regarding illegal campaign donation schemes. Bankman-Fried is currently waiting for his early October trial from jail after prosecutors accused him of witness tampering by leaking the private diary of former colleague and ex-girlfriend Ellison to the New York Times and using an encrypted message app to contact a potential witness. 

(Updated with details from prosecutors.)