Regulatory Violations

May 26, 2016

The CFTC ordered Cypress Wealth Management, Inc. and its former owners and operators, Ted L. Romeo of Pompano Beach, Florida, and Richard D. Schrutt of Tampa, Florida, to pay over $530,000 in penalties and restitution on charges that they illegally offered off-exchange financed transactions in precious metals to retail customers.  CFTC

May 9, 2016

The CFTC ordered Cunningham Commodities, LLC, based in Chicago, Illinois, and its head accountant, Salvatore Carmen Russo, to pay a penalty of $150,000 for failing to immediately report a customer's segregated account deficiency.  CFTC

March 25, 2016

The SEC brought fraud charges and obtained asset freezes against New Jersey fund manager John Bivona and his firms Saddle River Advisors and SRA Management Associates for marketing shares in promising pre-IPO tech companies in the Bay Area while stealing $5.7 million and diverting millions more to other improper and undisclosed uses.  The SEC alleges that Bivona used money raised through his firms to pay off earlier investors, prop up other funds, and pay family-related expenses.  He secretly steered the lion’s share of misappropriated funds to his nephew Frank Mazzola who was barred from the securities industry in a prior SEC enforcement action.  The SEC alleges that while Bivona raised more than $53 million from investors, the money he siphoned away for undisclosed uses left his firms continuously short of the cash needed to buy the shares promised to investors.  SEC

March 15, 2016

Kansas-based municipal advisor Central States Capital Markets, its CEO, and two employees will pay about $437,327 collectively to settle charges that they breached their fiduciary duties by failing to disclose a conflict of interest to a municipal client.  According to the SEC’s order, while Central States served as a municipal advisor to a client on municipal bond offerings in 2011, two of its employees, in consultation with the CEO, arranged for the offerings to be underwritten by a broker-dealer where all three worked as registered representatives.  Central States did not inform the client of its relationship to the underwriter or the financial benefit it obtained from serving in dual roles.  In three offerings, Central States received 90 percent of the underwriting fees the client city paid to the broker-dealer.  The case is the SEC’s first to enforce the fiduciary duty for municipal advisors created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act which required these advisors to put their municipal clients’ interests ahead of their own.  SEC

March 14, 2016

Three AIG affiliates, Royal Alliance Associates, SagePoint Financial, and FSC Securities Corporation, will pay $9.5 million to settle SEC charges of steering mutual fund clients toward more expensive share classes so the firms could collect more fees.  An SEC investigation found that the firms placed clients in share classes that charged fees for marketing and distribution despite the clients being eligible to buy shares in fund classes without those additional charges.  As a result, the firms collected approximately $2 million in extra fees.  The firms failed to disclose this conflict of interest.  The SEC’s order also alleged that the firms failed to monitor advisory accounts on a quarterly basis to prevent reverse churning.  The firms had compliance policies and procedures to ensure that fee-based advisory accounts that charged an inclusive fee for both advisory services and trading costs remained in the best interest of clients that traded infrequently, but failed to implement those policies and procedures.  SEC

March 11, 2016

The SEC charged California businessman Daniel Nase with raising money from investors through unregistered offerings of common stock in his Bakersfield, California-based company, BIC Real Estate Development Corp., and using the funds for personal expenses.  Nase tried to cover up the theft after learning of the SEC’s investigation by investing stolen assets back into the company to make it appear he was increasing his equity stake in it.  SEC

March 10, 2016

Texas-based oil company Magnum Hunter Resources Corporation as well as two former senior officers and two consultants will pay $290,000 collectively to settle charges of deficient evaluation of, and failure to maintain control over, Magnum Hunter’s internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR) between December 2011 and September 2013.  ICFR refers to a company’s process for providing reasonable assurance to the public regarding the reliability of its financial reporting.  SEC rules require company management to evaluate and annually report on the effectiveness of ICFR, including disclosing any identified material weaknesses that create a reasonable possibility that the company will not timely prevent or detect a material misstatement of its financial statements.  According to the SEC’s orders, Magnum Hunter enjoyed rapid growth in 2010 and significant acquisitions in 2010 and 2011 which strained its accounting resources.  Despite assessments that there was inadequate control over the financial reporting process, a material weakness was not reported.  SEC

March 9, 2016

Cyprus-based company Banc de Binary Ltd., its founder Oren Shabat Laurent, and three affiliates, will pay $11 million to settle charges of illegally selling binary options to U.S. investors.  The SEC’s 2013 complaint alleged that the defendants failed to register the offering before soliciting U.S. customers and failed to register as a broker-dealer before communicating directly with U.S. clients.  Binary options differ from more conventional options contracts because the payout typically depends entirely on whether the price of a particular asset underlying the option will rise above or fall below a specified amount.  The defendants will pay about $9 million to the SEC and $2 million to the CFTC which filed a parallel action.  A fair fund has been established to distribute money to the harmed investors.  SEC  

March 8, 2016

The SEC charged fund manager Steven Zoernack and his firm EquityStar Capital Management with operating without registration, providing false and misleading data to investors, and actively hiding Zoernack’s checkered past, including two felony fraud convictions and a bankruptcy filing.  SEC

March 7, 2016

The SEC charged the Rhode Island state agency now known as the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation and its bond underwriter Wells Fargo Securities with defrauding investors in connection with a municipal bond offering to finance a start-up video game company called 38 Studios.  The Rhode Island agency loaned $50 million in bond proceeds to 38 Studios.  However, the bond offering documents produced by the agency and Wells Fargo failed to disclose that 38 Studios had conveyed it needed at least $75 million in funding to produce a particular video game.  Therefore, investors were not fully informed that 38 Studios faced a funding shortfall even with the loan proceeds.  When 38 Studios was unable to obtain additional financing, the company defaulted on the loan.  The SEC also charged Wells Fargo’s lead banker on the deal and two Rhode Island agency executives with aiding and abetting the fraud.  The SEC’s complaint further alleges that Wells Fargo and the lead banker on the 38 Studios deal failed to disclose that Wells Fargo had a side deal with 38 Studios which enabled it to receive nearly double the amount of compensation disclosed in offering documents.  SEC