In Manhattan federal court, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain has blocked a $16.3 million interest payment that is due to COFINA bondholders on June 1 (COFINA bonds are those issued by the Puerto Rico local taxing authority and that are supposed to be supported by Puerto Rico sales taxes).…
Prosecutors have indicted a California man over his alleged involvement in an investment scam that bilked an ex-NFL player of $4.5M. Kenneth Ray Cleveland faces multiple counts of money laundering and wire fraud. The 63-year-old money manager served as the NFL player’s financial adviser for years beginning when the ex-pro…
SEC Charges Man Accused of Running $10M Ponzi Scam Mark Anderson Jones, whom the US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged with fraud, has been sentenced to 70 months in prison in a parallel criminal case. Jones pleaded guilty to running a $10M Ponzi scam. According to the SEC, Jones…
Over the weekend, Yasuna Murakami, a Cambridge-Massachusetts based hedge fund manager, was arrested and charged with wire fraud. Murakami, who managed MC2 Capital Management LLC, is accused of misappropriating investors’ funds in a Ponzi-like scam. The arrest and criminal charges come a few months after the state’s regulator, Secretary of…
Eight years after Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for defrauding investors in a $65 billion Ponzi scam, thousands of his victims have still not seen any of the money that they lost. These investors’ claims are being handled by Madoff Victim Fund administrator Richard Breedon, whose…
At the yearly general meeting in Germany, Deutsche Bank AG (DB) told shareholders that the German lender is nearing an agreement with ex-executives in which they would have to help pay for the fines that the financial institution paid for their past misconduct. Deutsche Bank has been trying to determine…
Although many of the thousands of cases investors in Puerto Rico bonds and closed-end funds have brought over the last three years have focused on UBS Financial Services Incorporated of Puerto Rico (“UBS-PR”), other brokerage firms in the Commonwealth engaged in the same wrongful sales practices. One such firm that…
In federal court in Sherman, TX, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has filed an emergency action to halt a $22.7M mortgage investment scam involving Thurman P. Bryant, III and his Bryant United Capital Funding, Inc. According to the regulator’s complaint, Bryant and his firm raised about $22.7M from about…
Tamer Moumen, an ex-hedge fund manager, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud. He now faces up to 20 years in prison for a $9M investment. Moumen defrauded over 50 investors. Many of his investors were close to retirement age. He advised dozens of them to liquidate retirement accounts, among other…
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is charging two-ex Nomura (NMR) head traders with fraud. Kee Chan and James Im ran Nomura Securities International Inc.’s commercial mortgage-backed securities desk. The regulator claims that they purposely lied to customers to inflate profits for themselves and the firm. As a result, said…