The former executive of the FTX crypto exchange, Ryan Salame, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for the role he played in the historic 2022 collapse.
The former lieutenant to Sam Bankman-Fried chose to follow in the footsteps of his ex-boss. This is because he took to X to blast personal thoughts on the extremely sensitive matter.
The thoughts
He served as the co-CEO of the Bahamas subsidiary of the FTX crypto exchange. Salame said that he should not have listened to multiple lawyers.
He said that he could have avoided the prison sentence if he had sold off his crypto as he planned rather than borrowing from Alameda against it.
The prison sentence is unexpectedly tough. Prosecutors had asked that the disgraced executive be sentenced to five to seven years.
Salame began posting on X within hours of receiving his sentence. He asked people to vote on who he should do his first public interview with.
One user jokingly suggested that he do it with the Department of Justice. The exec also made light of his ordeal by responding that he had just received the results of that particular interview.
The charges
Salame had chosen to plead guilty to charges of operating an unlicensed money transmitter business and campaign finance law violations.
He had done this just weeks before the criminal trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried had begun last fall.
The latter chose to plead not guilty to seven counts of money laundering, fraud, and conspiracy. He was found guilty and received a prison sentence of 25 years back in March.
It remains unclear if Salame’s position would have been better if he had chosen to navigate the collapse of the FTX exchange differently.
Most of the charges that had been levied against him were related to the way he had helped operate FTX over several years.
This included making donations to political candidates illegally at Bankman-Fried’s behest to avoid federal disclosure requirements.
The details
According to The New York Times, Ryan Salame will begin serving his prison sentence from August 29th. The fallen FTX executive had once been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He took to social media immediately after his sentencing, which is the first time that he has done so since the collapse of FTX in 2022.
Amongst the details Salame disclosed, he said that he had been unaware of the personal loan worth $55 million he had gotten from FTX.
He had learned about it during the initial bankruptcy proceedings of the exchange. However, he did not talk about the other financial actions he took knowingly amidst the company’s collapse.
This included the withdrawal of crypto tokens worth $5 million from the exchange just before it filed for bankruptcy and shut down.
The exec was accused of playing the ‘victim card’. He responded that he was not the victim but would slowly share details of what had occurred.
He also mentioned that there were a lot of details that people did not know as yet.