FINRA board member Joel Blumenschein has resigned as he was recently fined $30,000 and suspended by FINRA for allegedly failing to supervise one of his company’s brokers, Gary Gossett.
The complaint against Blumenschein, president of Freedom Investors, claimed that Gossett made “a series of unsuitable penny stock trades in the retirement account of a customer of limited means” without the customer’s permission.
FINRA described Freedom Investors’ oversight system as “so inadequate that Blumenschein was unable to provide a consistent or coherent description of it.” FINRA also claimed in the settlement that “his testimony, under oath, was at times both evasive and contradictory, thus highlighting the system’s inadequacies.”