Financial and Investment Fraud

July 21, 2020

Two unidentified whistleblowers will share a whistleblower reward totaling $1 million.  While the underlying enforcement action is not identified, the CFTC disclosed that information from the first whistleblower caused it to open an investigation, and information from the second whistleblower, who participated in the underlying scheme, significantly contributed to the investigation.  CFTC

July 20, 2020

UBS Financial Services Inc. and two of its registered representatives will pay $10 million in penalties, disgorgement, and interest to resolve claims that UBS improperly redirected municipal bond offerings away from retail customers and to “flippers,” who re-sold the bonds to other broker-dealers, including UBS.  This practice allowed UBS to circumvent the priority retail order periods set by bond issuers and improperly obtain a greater allocation of bonds for its own inventory.  SEC

July 10, 2020

A 70-year-old man in North Carolina who pleaded guilty to orchestrating a $22 million Ponzi scheme through his company, Oodles Inc., has been sentenced to 17.5 years in prison and ordered to pay $17 million in restitution.  Hal H. Brown Jr. singlehandedly defrauded at least 60 victims—including family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members—by falsely representing that Oodles owned hundreds of millions of dollars in rights to religious-themed family shows and movies.  To bolster his claims, Brown developed marketing material, falsified bank statements and company agreements, and impersonated employees of media companies.  USAO WDNC

July 7, 2020

After being found guilty of eighteen fraud-related felonies, Todd Michael Ficeto, a former Beverly Hills stockbroker, has been sentenced to 6 years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $216 million in restitution to investor victims for his role in a massive penny stock fraud scheme.  From 2004 to 2007, Ficeto and co-conspirators fraudulently manipulated penny stocks to exaggerate the reported profits of a co-conspirator’s hedge fund, Absolute Funds.  When the scheme unraveled, Ficeto attempted to conceal the fraud by lying to investigators from the Securities Exchange Commission and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.  One of his alleged co-conspirators—hedge fund owner Florian Wilhelm Jürgen Homm—has fled to Germany as a fugitive from justice.  USAO CDCA

July 7, 2020

Deutsche Bank AG and Deutsche Bank Trust Company America will pay a $150 million penalty to New York in a settlement with the State’s Department of Financial Services resolving charges that the bank failed to adequately monitor the activity of its customer Jeffrey Epstein and failed to adequately monitor its international corresponding banking relationships with Danske Bank Estonia and FBME Bank.  In the case of Epstein, Deutsche Bank processed hundreds of transactions totaling millions of dollars that allegedly should have prompted additional scrutiny.  In the case of Danske Bank and FBME, Deutsche Bank was alleged to have been put on notice that those foreign banks were engaged in money laundering but, despite assigning the highest risk ratings to those institutions, failed to take appropriate actions to prevent the processing of suspicious transactions by those banks through Deutsche Bank accounts.  NY

July 2, 2020

The Lithuanian Assistance Foundation, together with several of its individual officers and directors, will pay $7 million and be dissolved.  The settlement resolves claims of charity fraud based on allegations that property interests donated to the Foundation were improperly transferred to members of the board, their relatives, and employees at prices significantly below the fair market value.  The Foundation failed to disclose the transfers in regulatory filings, and filed false registration renewals.  CA

July 2, 2020

Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. will pay $21 million to resolve SEC charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  Alexion subsidiaries in Turkey and Russia were alleged to have made payments to foreign officials in those countries in order to secure favorable regulatory treatment for Alexion’s drug Soliris, and to increase the number of prescriptions for the drug.  The Turkish and Russian subsidiaries, as well as Alexion subsidiaries in Brazil and Colombia, falsified their books and records with respect to improper payments, and Alexion’s internal accounting controls were not adequate to detect or prevent the improper payments and accounting.  SEC