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May 06, 2016 at 05:09 AM
Among recent enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission were fraud charges against 10 individuals for tricking investors into a stock purchase and a settlement with a Silicon Valley executive on insider trading charges.
In addition, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority censured and fined a firm for failing to apply appropriate discounts to clients’ unit investment trust purchases.
SEC Charges 10 With Fraud on Stock Promotion, Kickbacks
Ten people were charged with fraud by the SEC for selling stock in a kickback scheme.
According to the agency, the schemes used in the fraud were laced with cash bribes and other kickbacks to registered representatives and unregistered brokers who solicited investors to buy stock in ForceField Energy Inc.
Investors had no idea that the people soliciting them to buy the stock were being paid by a ringleader — ForceField’s then-chairman Richard St. Julien — to steer them to the stock. In fact, some of the 10 went so far in their efforts to escape detection that they communicated via prepaid disposable “burner” phones and encrypted, content-expiring text messages.
Their efforts were in vain, however. The SEC charged St. Julien, purported investor relations professional Jared Mitchell and investment newsletter Wall Street Buy Sell Hold publisher Christopher Castaldo, along with registered representatives Richard Brown, Gerald Cocuzzo, Naveed (Nick) Khan, Maroof Miyana and Pranav Patel and unregistered brokers Herschel (Tres) Knippa and Louis Petrossi.
St. Julien himself had tried to hide the illegality of his actions by using a company in Belize to pay the kickbacks, wiring money from a company bank account to Mitchell, who called himself the “brown bag man” and withdrew the payments and paid cash bribes in person to Brown, Cocuzzo, Khan, Miyana and Patel.
Castaldo lured his victims to invest in ForceField through a nationwide cold-calling campaign he conducted from his office on Long Island in New York. He recorded the prices and amounts sold to investors and sent the information to St. Julien so he could receive the kickbacks, which were wired to him through the Belizean company.
Neither Petrossi nor Knippa was registered as a broker to solicit investments in ForceField’s private placement offerings, and they received undisclosed kickbacks from St. Julien.
Petrossi told one investor in an email that “I can not [sic] be bought,” and Knippa went so far as to appear on the Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.” show and the Business News Network as a purported market commentator to tout ForceField as a great investment — but never told his hosts or viewers he was being paid to solicit investors for ForceField. Meanwhile, Knippa said something else entirely to St. Julien in text message exchanges: “I can pitch (ForceField) as good as anyone in the world.”
The SEC seeks disgorgement plus prejudgment interest, penalties and permanent injunctions against all defendants as well as penny stock bars against St. Julien, Castaldo, and Petrossi and an officer-and-director bar against St. Julien.
