FTX Bahamas co-CEO Ryan Salame Told The Truth About FTX And SBF
According to court documents, Ryan Salame told the Bahaman securities regulator that FTX was sending customer funds to Alameda Research.
Two days before the cryptocurrency exchange was forced to close, a high-ranking employee at FTX’s Bahamian branch told local regulators that there might have been fraud at the exchange.
Bahamian court records filed on December 14 show that Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets (FDM), told the Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB) on November 9 that FTX was sending customer funds to its sister trading firm, Alameda Research.
Salame said that the money was to make up for Alameda’s financial losses and that the transfer was not authorized or approved by their clients.
He also told the SCB that only the former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder of FTX, Zixiao “Gary” Wang, and an FTX engineer, Nishad Singh, had the proper access to move client assets to Alameda.
Christina Rolle, who is the executive director of SCB, called the commissioner of the Royal Bahamas Police Force to ask for an investigation because the information may be the result of misappropriation, theft, fraud, or some other crime.
The next day, on November 10, the SCB froze FDM’s assets and stopped the company from being registered in the country. The Bahamian Supreme Court appointed a provisional liquidator to save the company’s assets.
The records show that this is the first time anyone knows that an executive from FTX or Alameda helped the police.
The filings suggest that Salame is in Washington, D.C., and he has not heard from in public since the collapse of the exchange.
His last public tweet was on November 7, when he replied “lol” to Binance co-founder Yi He, who explained why the exchange sold its FTX Token FTT holdings.
In recent weeks, it is also thought that a former executive from one of FTX’s related companies has been helping the police.
On December 4, there was a lot of talk about pictures that were said to show Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison in a New York coffee shop near the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It made some people think that she might have been making a deal with the government after the FTX collapse.
So far, only Bankman-Fried from FTX and Alameda has been charged, which supports the idea that executives from both companies are helping the police.
He is being charged with wire and securities fraud, money laundering, and breaking the rules about how to pay for political campaigns.
Bankman-Fried, Wang, Singh, and Ellison are said to have used the encrypted messaging app Signal to send secret information about FTX and Alameda’s operations through a group chat called “Wirefraud.” Bankman-Fried said he knew nothing about the group and had nothing to do with it.
