Friday 8 May 2015

Tell It to the Judge: SEC Complaints and Settlements 2015



Tell It to the Judge: SEC Complaints and Settlements 2015
From Citybiz List Baltimore

The Securities and Exchange Commission made the front page in 2015 with its record financial penalty of more than $92.8 million against Galleon's billionaire fund manager Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading. In a related case, the SEC charged former McKinsey & Co. global head Rajat K. Gupta with sharing insider stock tips with Rajaratnam. The Madoff saga continued to play out in 2015 as the SEC drew a bead on Bernie's satellites. The agency charged longtime Madoff aide Enrica Cotellessa-Pitz with falsifying books and records, while David Kugel allegedly created fake trades to support the Ponzi Scheme. The SEC also cracked down on six executives from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for fraud relating to high-risk mortgage loans, including subprime loans.

In a Maryland court, the SEC closed out its $700M fraud suit with former U.S. Foodservice executive Mark Kaiser. In the banking sector, the SEC alleged that Pennsylvania resident Frank L. Pavlico III and Washington D.C. attorney Brynee K. Baylor operated a prime bank scheme to defraud investors out of more than $2 million. Bethesda's Garfield M. Taylor incurred the agency's wrath for a multimillion dollar Ponzi scheme targeting investors in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. The SEC froze the assets of Boston-area money manager Andrey C. Hicks for misleading investors in a supposed quantitative hedge fund, while Massachusetts resident Geoffrey J. Eiten got caught stretching the truth about penny stocks. Finally, Philly businessman Tyrone L. Gilliams was charged with misappropriating approximately $5 million from investors through an offering scheme involving U.S. Treasury STRIPS.