Former FTX executive home raided by FBI

Former FTX executive home raided by FBI Thursday morning at the Potomac, Maryland home of Ryan Salame, a former executive at FTX and a significant campaign contributor to Republican political candidates. According to two sources familiar with the matter, Mr. Salame, who ran FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary and was part of the close circle of advisers around FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried, is under scrutiny over the $24 million in campaign contributions he made during last year’s midterm elections.

The search of Mr. Salame’s $4 million house signals that federal authorities are not done with their investigation into FTX’s collapse as they prepare for Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial set for October. Mr. Bankman-Fried has been charged with orchestrating a vast fraud and illegal campaign finance scheme at FTX, and three of his former top executives have pleaded guilty in connection with the investigation and agreed to cooperate against their former boss.

Mr. Salame has become enormously wealthy as the crypto market boomed and FTX reached a $32 billion valuation. Bankruptcy lawyers and advisers for FTX said in March that Mr. Salame received $87 million in bonuses and loans from Alameda, the crypto hedge fund that he worked for before joining FTX. He was one of a half-dozen top executives who received a total of $3.2 billion in payouts. However, federal authorities have claimed that most of the $90 million contributed to political candidates by a handful of former FTX employees, including Mr. Salame, had been misappropriated from customers of the exchange.