In 2025, Faraday Future disbursed approximately $7.5 million to a firm overseen by its founder, Jia Yueting, as per a recent regulatory submission.

The electric vehicle startup, which has faced ongoing challenges, executed these payments during a year where it only managed to deliver four vehicles and incurred losses nearing $400 million. The company has shifted focus towards marketing affordable vans and robots sourced from China.

These transactions occurred while Faraday Future was still facing scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was investigating what are referred to as “related party transactions” involving the firm and parties associated with or managed by Jia, as indicated by its own disclosures. The SEC was also examining whether Faraday Future accurately depicted the extent of control that Jia exercised over the company at the time it went public in 2021, and whether it misrepresented initial sales figures of its EVs in 2023.

As TechCrunch initially reported, the SEC concluded its four-year investigation in March, even after having issued notices to Faraday Future, Jia, and several other executives the previous year, indicating that they were proposing an enforcement action. The investigation’s closure occurred during a historical decline in white-collar crime enforcement in the duration of the second Trump administration.

Details of the new transactions were disclosed in Faraday Future’s annual proxy report published on Thursday. It reveals that the company allotted a combination of monthly “consulting” fees of $100,000, a “bonus payment” of $2 million, and $1.7 million to settle loans from the organization known as FF Global Partners LLC. The company did not clarify the remaining $2.6 million in the document.

Faraday Future did not answer a comment request.

In its proxy filing, Faraday Future refers to FF Global as an “affiliate” of Jia and has indicated in earlier filings that he maintains “significant influence” over the LLC. FF Global includes five “voting managers,” one being Jia, while the others consist of business associates and a relative — his nephew, Jerry Wang.

Wang, who serves as president at Faraday Future, receives a six-figure salary from FF Global, as stated in the filing. His wife, who leads FF Global’s legal team, also earns a similar salary. Additionally, FF Global has a parallel “consulting agreement” with a cryptocurrency holding company managed by Wang (and advised by Jia), named AIXC. (Wang’s wife’s law office also provides consulting services for AIXC.)

FF Global is a significant stakeholder in Faraday Future and — together with Jia — oversees nearly all operations of the EV firm, which has led Faraday to classify this as a risk factor in its latest annual report.

“Jia and FF Global, over which Mr. Jia holds substantial influence, govern our management, business, and operations, and may exert this control in ways that do not align with our business or financial aims or strategies, or that may otherwise contradict our interests,” the company stated earlier this year.

FF Global was instrumental in restoring Jia to power following the company’s public listing in 2021. Shortly after Faraday Future merged with a special purpose acquisition company, the newly formed public company board initiated an inquiry into Jia’s financial activities in relation to the company and the disclosures provided during the merger process.

In early 2022, the board moved to sideline Jia, who has been blacklisted by China due to financial misconduct, after uncovering that Faraday Future had misrepresented the level of control he held over the company. They subsequently reported their findings to the SEC, which launched its inquiry soon after.

Throughout 2022, FF Global advocated for the replacement of certain board members with those sympathetic to Jia. The campaign escalated to the point where several board members received threats to their lives. Ultimately, these board members resigned partly out of fear for their safety. Jia was reinstated as co-CEO last year, becoming the sole CEO of Faraday Future.

FF Global is not the only entity connected to Jia that Faraday Future has compensated or intends to compensate. The proxy filing indicates that the company paid $700,000 to a lending firm linked to him in the previous year. It also owes $8.5 million to Leshi Information Technology Co. Ltd., one of the firms connected to his failed Chinese tech conglomerate LeEco, for “advertising services.”