Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
I wrote last week how the Securities and Exchange Commission had 18% of its staff depart in fiscal year 2025 thanks to the DOGE efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce. For Fiscal Year 2027, the SEC is proposing to reduce its budget by another 11%. However, the SEC is proposing to add…
This is press release that would not have been written by judge Margaret Ryan if she was still serving as the Director of Enforcement. She only lasted six months with the rapid down-sizing and lack of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. I was stunned to see the SEC attack its prior stewardship in…
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued a proposed rule intended to “fundamentally reform” financial institutions’ anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism programs under the Bank Secrecy Act. The three key changes according to FinCEN: Those all sound more like goals than changes. It doesn’t tell us what the…
A trucking company is looking for capital. It needs trailers and trucks. You give the company money to buy the truck on your behalf and the trucking company leases it back to you. The truck company will arrange the purchase and financing. It will find a driver. It will take care of licensing, registration, insurance,…
You’re senior management of a public company. You just made a million dollar bonus for performance. You get paid $735,000 if the company is sold. You’ve got 150,000 shares of company stock that’ll be worth over $4 million. You’re in the process of selling the company. Do you tell your wife and best friend about…
In fiscal year 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission had a departure of 18% of its employees. The SEC’s Division of Investment Management lost 24% of its staff during fiscal year 2025. What is the effect of the departure? The GAO had interviews with several dozen SEC employees. We’ll see how this affects the SEC….
“BREAKING NEWS THE [Politician] PORTFOLIO ON DUB SOARED +7.77% TODAY, HITTING A NEW ALL TIME HIGH OF +120%” This proposed marketing blurb was submitted at 2:31 pm., before the markets has closed for the day. As the Massachusetts Secretary of State pointed out, that is not performance for the day. It’s only performance for part…
These are some compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention. She Was Invisible for Six Months. Then She Found Out She Was Even More Invisible Than She Thought. By John Reed Stark in LinkedIn And here is the darkest irony embedded in that transcript: the SEC enforcement division Ryan helped hollow out — the one…
If you’re going to tell your clients that their money will be invested according to a particular strategy, you need to invest it according to that strategy. If you say that “portfolio management services are based on Modern Portfolio Theory” then you should do so. Should you invest 70% of the client’s assets according to…
I was scratching my head for a while after my initial reading of the Securities and Exchange Commission action against Madison Capital Funding. The SEC dove into a valuation process that seemed relatively straight-forward to me, but labeled it a fraud. Madison’s business model is a bit complex. It originates loans. (This was 2020, before…