Original title: Ex-FTX Insider Salame Says US Broke Deal on Girlfriend Probe
Original article by Ava Benny-Morrison and Chris Dolmetsch
Compiled by: Alvis, Mars Finance
Former FTX executive Ryan Salame has asked a U.S. judge to throw out his conviction or block any prosecution of his girlfriend, alleging prosecutors reneged on an agreement to stop investigating her if he took a plea deal.
But government lawyers bringing a criminal case against FTX insiders said there was no such agreement and called Salame’s allegations false and incomplete.
The former boss of FTX’s Bahamas subsidiary made the sensational allegations in a federal court filing in New York on Wednesday, nearly three months after he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for his role in illegal activities before the cryptocurrency platform’s collapse.
According to the documents, prosecutors used the plea negotiations to threaten Salaam's partner, Michelle Bond, the mother of Salaam's eight-month-old child. In April 2023, the FBI searched the Maryland home that Bond, a cryptocurrency advocate and 2022 Republican candidate for Congress, shared with Salaam.
“In order to induce Salaam to plead guilty, government lawyers said they would drop the Bond investigation if Salaam pleaded guilty,” attorney Christopher Bartolomucci wrote.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment. But in a response letter filed Wednesday evening, the office offered a different view and urged the court to reject Salaam’s “brazen” attempt to renege on his guilty plea.
The government said it made clear to Salaam’s lawyers during a virtual meeting in May 2023 that his guilty plea would not stop the investigation into Bond’s own conduct.
“It was following this call that Salam pleaded guilty,” the government’s letter reads.
Salaam, a prolific political donor during his time at FTX who pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws and operating an unlicensed money transmitter, claimed the government had resumed its investigation into Bond for campaign finance violations, but Bond has not yet been charged with any crime.
Salaam asked U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to block any prosecution of Bond or else vacate his conviction and plea agreement.
“In this case, the government failed to fulfill its implied assurances to secure Salaam’s guilty plea, which any reasonable person would have interpreted as a guarantee that the government would cease any investigation of Bond,” Salaam’s court filing states.
Salam is the last of four top FTX figures to plead guilty to criminal offenses following a sweeping investigation that resulted in FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried being sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Unlike former Bankman-Fried deputies Nishad Singh, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, Salaam did not sign a cooperation agreement and did not testify at Bankman-Fried's trial late last year. There are no written conditions in Salaam's plea agreement to support his claims of prosecutors' assurances.
He claimed that an assistant U.S. attorney told him that, while the condition could not be written into his plea agreement, if the government ended its investigation into Salaam, the investigation into Bond would also end.
The motion comes less than two months before Salaam is due to start serving his sentence, which was delayed because he needed surgery after being mauled in the face by a German shepherd.
