Former FTX executive Ryan Salame, who bought a private jet while working for the crypto exchange, to plead guilty
Another former FTX executive is planning to plead guilty in a sprawling case the Justice Department has brought against the disgraced crypto exchange and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Ryan Salame, who was co-chief of FTX Digital Markets, the firm’s Bahamian subsidiary, will likely submit his plea on Thursday afternoon, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The ex-FTX executive previously had been under scrutiny for making extensive campaign donations—$24 million in total—to Republican candidates, including his girlfriend, Michelle Bond, who ran in the 2022 Republican primary for a congressional seat in New York. The FBI searched the home of Salame, who reportedly bought a private jet while at FTX, in April.
Jason Linder, a lawyer for Salame, nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment from Fortune.
Salame’s guilty plea would follow the high-profile deals three other former FTX executives have struck with prosecutors as the federal government prepares to try Bankman-Fried on seven charges—beginning Oct. 2—in what promises to be one of the most highly watched white-collar criminal cases in decades.
In late December, a little more than one month after FTX, once valued at $32 billion, spectacularly collapsed, Gary Wang and Caroline Ellison reached plea deals with federal prosecutors. Wang was a cofounder as well as former CTO of the exchange, and Ellison was the co-CEO of Alameda Research, the crypto hedge fund also founded by Bankman-Fried. Nishad Singh, an FTX founder who also led the firm’s engineering team, pleaded guilty in February.
Bankman-Fried, who had been out on bail for $250 million and living at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, recently ran afoul of federal prosecutors by allegedly tampering with witnesses and was sent to a Brooklyn jail to await trial.
First, he allegedly wrote to a top FTX lawyer over the messaging app Signal and said that he’d “really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”
Then, in July, the New York Times published a story on Ellison, who also dated Bankman-Fried. Prosecutors allege Bankman-Fried leaked documents to the Times, a fact he’s never directly disputed.
