Former FTX CEO Ryan Salame’s home raided by FBI: Report
The home of former FTX co-CEO Ryan Salame has reportedly been raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as further scrutiny falls on the executive for his close advisory role to Sam Bankman-Fried.
An April 27 report by The New York Times, citing people with knowledge of the matter, said the Bureau searched Salame’s $4 million home in Potomac, Maryland on the morning of April 27.
It is still unclear what the authorities were looking for. Salame was co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, which was FTX’s Bahamas-based subsidiary.
As reported by Cointelegraph, Salame was a significant recipient of suspicious loans and payments made to a number of FTX senior executives with the help of the now-bankrupt firm’s trading house Alameda Research.
Salame was the fourth largest recipient of these payments, having received a total of $87 million in compensation. Bankman-Fried received $2.2 billion while former director of engineering Nishad Singh and co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang received $587 million and $246 million, respectively.
FTX’s new management, led by attorney and bankruptcy specialist John Ray III, said at the time that it would further investigate its rights to pursue potential actions against the receivers, along with their subsequent acquirers, and that ongoing efforts “are expected to result in further identification of assets , debt and transfers.”
It added that it was considering the various ways it could seek to recover the funds from the former managers.
According to Bahamian court documents dated December 14, 2022, Salame was the first executive from FTX or Alameda Research to begin assisting authorities with their investigation. Salame blew the whistle to the Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB) on November 9 that FTX was sending client funds to sister trading firm Alameda Research.
In addition, Salame told SCB that the funds were to “cover financial losses to Alameda” and the transfer was “not authorized or consented to by their clients.”
He also informed SCB that only three individuals had the access required to transfer client funds to Alameda: Bankman-Fried, Wang and Singh.
Related: “The war room was in despair” – Scaramucci tells that FTX collapsed on Consensus
According to government donation tracking service Open Secrets, Salame was one of the top political donors in the 2022 election, having donated more than $23 million to Republican campaigns across more than 200 individual donations.
Cointelegraph reached out to Salame’s attorney Jason Linder and the FBI for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
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