SEC Bars Ex-Pimco CEO Hodge Over College Admissions Scam

The sanction comes more than a year after the executive was sentenced to nine months in prison for his actions.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has barred Douglas Hodge, the former Pimco CEO who once safeguarded the retirement savings of millions of Americans, over his role in the biggest college admissions scandal the U.S. government has ever prosecuted.

Pimco declined to comment on Monday about its former executive’s being barred.

In an order posted on the SEC’s website last week, the SEC said it had accepted a settlement offer by Hodge in which he agreed to be barred from associating with any broker, dealer, investment advisor, municipal securities dealer, municipal advisor, transfer agent, or nationally recognized statistical rating organization, and also to be barred from participating in any offering of a penny stock.

Hodge was sentenced in February 2020 to nine months in prison for paying $850,000 in bribes to get four of his children into the University of Southern California and Georgetown as phony soccer and tennis team recruits. The sentence was pronounced in federal court in Boston. Hodge was the 14th parent to be sentenced.

It was not immediately clear on Monday why it took the SEC more than a year to bar Hodge from the industry. The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“As a parent, I have counseled my children to listen to that inner voice that tells them right from wrong,” Hodge said in court at the time of his sentencing last year. “Well, I did not listen to mine.”

The government had asked for a two-year term, saying Hodge was among the “most culpable” of parents prosecuted, even as he sought leniency, comparing his crimes to those of a parent in the case sentenced to six months behind bars, which had been the longest term.

Prosecutors said Hodge committed fraud despite enjoying “extreme, almost unfathomable privilege” as the leader of the giant bond manager Pacific Investment Management Co. He used a corrupt admissions counselor’s “side door” scheme more often and longer than any of the other 35 parents charged in the scandal, it was alleged.

(Pictured: Douglas Hodge, former CEO of PIMCO; credit: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg)