Financial Crime Weekly

SEC Charges Cantor Fitzgerald With Causing 2 SPACs To Make Misleading Statements The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday charged  financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P. with causing two special purpose acquisition companies that it controlled to make misleading statements...

Man Sentenced To 51 Months In Prison For Fraud, Ordered To Pay $6.1 Million  Mykalai Kontilai, a 55-year-old Las Vegas resident, was sentenced on Thursday to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $6.1 million in restitution for his involvement in a long-running fraud scheme. Kontilai, who...

WAMCO’s Ken Leech Charged With Fraud For Allegedly ‘Cherry-Picking' Trades The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday announced fraud charges against Stephen Kenneth ("Ken") Leech, the former co-chief investment officer of Western Asset Management Company LLC or WAMCO, owned by...

Rudy's Performance Parts Inc., a North Carolina automotive parts maker and seller, and its owner Aaron Rudolf have agreed to pay a total of $10 million in criminal fines and civil penalties for making, selling and installing devices, commonly known as "defeat devices," used to remove or disable...

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc. USA, a generic pharmaceutical manufacturer in Mahwah, New Jersey, agreed to pay $25 million for allegedly conspiring to fix the price of a generic drug. The U.S. government alleged under the False Claims Act that Glenmark gave and received payments between 2013 and...

A Mississippi seafood distributor and two company managers pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring with others to mislabel seafood and to commit wire fraud by marketing inexpensive and frozen imported substitutes as more expensive and premium local species. Quality Poultry and Seafood Inc. (QPS),...

Intrepid U.S.A. Inc., a Dallas-based health care and hospice provider, has agreed to pay $3.85 million for allegedly submitting Medicare claims for patients who did not qualify for coverage. On Tuesday, the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged that between 2016 and 2021 19 Intrepid facilities...

A Michigan asphalt company must pay a $6.5 million fine for conspiring with other asphalt businesses over four years to rig bids for paving jobs across the state. Pontiac-based Asphalt Specialists LLC pleaded guilty on Jan. 30 for taking part in the conspiracy with Al's Asphalt Paving Company Inc....

DaVita Inc. (NYSE:DVA), a Colorado-based kidney dialysis provider, agreed to pay $34.5 million for allegedly paying kickbacks to a competitor for making referrals to DaVita Rx, a former subsidiary that provided pharmacy services for dialysis patients. DaVita also allegedly paid kickbacks to...

Andreas Bechtolsheim, founder and chief architect of Silicon Valley-based technology company Arista Networks Inc (NYSE:ANET), this week agreed to settle charges of insider trading, paying a civil penalty of nearly $1 million. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that...

“Thousands of ordinary people lost their savings,” said prosecutors in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried this week, urging the judge to enact the harshest possible punishment when the disgraced founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX is sentenced next week. Bankman-Fried was...

A woman on trial for allegedly laundering billions of dollars of Bitcoin into cash told a London court on Friday that she was the victim of skillful manipulation by a “super villain.” Jian Wen is on trial for allegedly laundering Bitcoin in cash for Yadi Zhang, who ran a fraudulent...

The Securities and Exchange Commission reported this week that it had obtained final judgments against a California-based beverages company that marketed a scam share scheme whose proceeds were spent on luxury items and casino binges. SHE Beverage Company and its principals Lupe Rose, Sonja Shelby...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this week won rulings against two defendants in a cryptocurrency scam that allegedly defrauded up to $45 million out of private investors. The U.S. Court for the Northern District of Illinois entered final judgments against Arline Woodbury of Ridgewood,...

The former chief financial officer of cloud services provider Synchronoss Technologies (NASDAQ:SNCR) allegedly overstated the company’s finances to match revenue expectations it otherwise would have failed to meet. Last week, a New York District Court granted the Securities and Exchange...