Faraday Future paid around $7.5 million to a firm controlled by its founder Jia Yueting in 2025, according to a latest regulatory filing.

The long-struggling electric vehicle startup made the payments in a year when it delivered only four vehicles and lost nearly $400 million. The enterprise has pivoted to selling cheaper vans and robots imported from China.

The payments happened while Faraday Future was still under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was probing what are known as “related party transactions” between the corporation and entities related to or controlled by Jia, Faraday’s own filings have shown. The SEC was also investigating whether Faraday Future properly represented the level of control Jia had over the corporation when it went public in 2021, and whether it lied about early sales of its EVs in 2023.

The SEC dropped its four-year investigation in March, as TechCrunch first reported, despite having sent notices to Faraday Future, Jia, and other executives last year stating that investigators were recommending an enforcement action. The closure of the investigation comes amid a historic drop in white-collar crime enforcement during the second Trump administration.

The novel transactions were revealed in Faraday Future’s annual proxy filing published on Thursday. It shows Faraday Future paid a mix of monthly $100,000 “consulting” fees, a $2 million “bonus payment,” and $1.7 million to repay loans from the business, which is called FF Global Partners LLC. The business did not explain the remaining $2.6 million in the filing.

Faraday Future did not respond to a request for comment.

Faraday Future describes FF Global as an “affiliate” of Jia in the proxy filing, and in previous filings has stated he exerts “significant influence” over the LLC. FF Global has five “voting managers,” one of whom is Jia, while the others include business associates and a family member — his nephew Jerry Wang.

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Wang, who is a president at Faraday Future, draws a six-figure salary from FF Global, according to the filing. So does his wife, who is the head of FF Global’s legal department. FF Global also has a similar “consulting agreement” with a crypto holding firm run by Wang (and advised by Jia) called AIXC. (Wang’s wife’s law firm also consults for AIXC.)

FF Global is also a major shareholder of Faraday Future and — with Jia — controls almost every aspect of the EV business, to the point that Faraday labels this as a risk factor in its most recent annual filing.

“Jia and FF Global, over which Mr. Jia exercises significant influence, have control over our management, business and operations, and may apply this control in ways that are not aligned with our business or financial objectives or strategies or that are otherwise inconsistent with our interests,” the organization wrote earlier this year.

FF Global also helped bring Jia back to power after the organization went public in 2021. Shortly after Faraday Future merged with a special purpose acquisition business, the fresh public enterprise board of directors opened an investigation into Jia’s movement of capital in and out of the organization, and into the disclosures made during the merger process.

In early 2022, the board sidelined Jia, who has been blacklisted by China for financial fraud, after finding Faraday Future had misrepresented the level of control he had over the business. They then referred their findings to the SEC, which opened its investigation shortly after. This also touches on aspects of iOS.

FF Global, meanwhile, spent all of 2022 agitating to replace certain board members with ones friendly to Jia. This campaign became so intense that multiple board members received death threats. Those board members ultimately resigned in part because they feared for their lives. Jia was re-installed as co-CEO last year, and is now Faraday Future’s sole CEO.

FF Global is not the only Jia-related business that Faraday Future has paid, or plans to pay, funds to. The organization stated in its proxy filing that it paid $700,000 to a loan corporation associated with him last year. It also owes $8.5 million to Leshi Information Digital systems Co. Ltd., one of the companies related to his failed Chinese tech conglomerate LeEco, for “advertising services.”

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