PERE 50 and SEC Registration

Private Equity Real Estate has released its ranking of the top 50 real estate private equity fund managers. As I have done in the past, I parsed the list to see which managers are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as investment advisers.

1 Registered Blackstone
2 Registered Brookfield
3 Registered Starwood Capital Group
4 Registered Lone Star Funds
5 Registered The Carlyle Group
6 Exempt Reporting GLP
7 Registered Pacific Investment Management Co.
8 Registered AEW Global
9 Registered GreenOak Real Estate
10 Registered Tishman Speyer
11 Registered Oaktree Capital Management
12 Registered CBRE Global Investors
13 Registered Angelo Gordon
14 Registered Ares Management
15 Registered Rockpoint Group
16 Registered CIM Group
17 Registered Crow Holdings Capital Partners
18 Registered Rialto Capital
19 Registered Cerberus Capital Management
20 Registered Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing
21 Registered LaSalle Investment Management
22 Registered Westbrook Partners
23 Exempt Reporting Gaw Capital Partners
24 Registered Harrison Street Real Estate Capital
25 Registered Walton Street Capital
26 Registered KKR
27 Registered Bridge Investment Group
28 Registered Colony Northstar
29  Exempt Reporting ESR
30 Overseas Meyer Bergman
31 Overseas Kildare Partners
32 Registered  Invesco Real Estate
33 Exempt Reporting Partners Group
34 Registered KSL Capital Partners
35 Registered Exeter Property Group
36 Registered Orion Capital Managers
37 Registered PGIM Real Estate
38 Registered DRA Advisors
39 Overseas Keppel Capital
40 Exempt Reporting Aermont Capital
41 Registered DivcoWest
42 Exempt Reporting PAG
43 Registered Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors
44 Overseas Patrizia (including Rockspring Property Investment Managers)
45 Overseas Tristan Capital Partners
46 Registered  GTIS Partners New York
47 Registered Almanac Realty Investors
48 Registered Fortress Investment Group
49 Registered BlackRock Real Estate
50 Registered Northwood Investors

It’s a full boat this year. All 50 are (1) registered with the SEC as an investment adviser, (2) registered as an exempt reporting adviser, or (3) operate completely overseas outside of SEC jurisdiction.

There are good arguments to be made on both sides of the registration debate for real estate funds. The core requirement under the Investment Advisers Act is that the manager is giving investment advice about “securities.” Most of these real estate fund managers are truly focused on real estate and not securities. However, the discussion between what is and is not a security may be fun for the first week of your securities law class in law school. It’s not a fun discussion when trying to comply with regulatory requirements.

It looks like the “register” side of the debate has overwhelming won for the largest firms.

PERE Methodology

The PERE 50 ranking “measures private equity real estate firms by equity raised over the last five-year period. For this year’s ranking, the relevant period runs from January 1, 2013, to end of March 2018. Qualifying equity is raised for direct real estate investment through closed-ended, commingled real estate funds and co-investment vehicles that sit alongside those funds. The firm must have discretion over the fund’s capital, meaning club funds, separate accounts and joint ventures are excluded from the ranking. Further, as a ranking of private equity real estate firms, only funds with value-added and opportunistic investment strategies qualify. Strategies such as core and core-plus, as well as those not focused on direct real estate, like fund of funds, debt funds, and funds where the primary strategy is not real estate focused, such as general private equity, are excluded.”

Sources:

Proposed Enhanced Investment Adviser Regulation

Yesterday I pointed out the fiduciary duty obligations laid out in the SEC’s new release. The other half of the release is a request for comment on three new proposals to enhance investment adviser regulation.

  • Federal Licensing and Continuing Education
  • Provision of Account Statements
  • Financial Responsibility

The SEC notes these as areas where the broker-dealer framework provides investor protections that do not have counterparts in the registered investment adviser framework.

Federal Licensing and Continuing Education

The federal securities laws do not impose licensing or qualification requirements on investment advisers. Broker-dealers, through FINRA, are subject to licensing, qualification, and continuing education requirements. The first question of should RIA reps be licensed seems like a done deal. I believe the SEC is looking for comments on the requirements, avoiding duplication for dual-registered personnel and the exam process. I assume that FINRA is going to step in and take over this process.

Provision of Account Statements

I found this request to be a bit strange. Broker-dealers have to send account statements and transaction confirmations. Registered investment advisers rely on the custodian to do this.

From my perspective, the SEC also needs to focus on how these additional deliveries would work for non-retail investment adviser clients, like private funds.

Financial Responsibility

Broker-dealers are subject to capital requirements. The firms need to have minimum levels of net capital and liquidity. Of course, broker-dealers are holding customer assets directly while investment advisers have the client assets with a qualified custodian.

I suspect any of these proposals would have a big impact on smaller registered investment advisers. I thought the Custody Rule was supposed to address these concerns.

Sources:

All of Your Fiduciary Duty in One Place

Of the trio of regulatory releases from the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, the one targeted at registered investment advisers is a little weird. It sets out the fiduciary duty of investment advisers, sort of, and proposes some new regulations.

One of the problems with the fiduciary duty is that it is not explicitly written into the statutes or regulations of the Investment Advisers Act. The SEC latched on to Section 206 and court cases have followed along. But if you look through the Act or the regulations you will not find a fiduciary duty stated.  Last week’s regulatory release, at least in part, was to “reaffirm – and in some cases clarify – certain aspects of the fiduciary duty that an investment adviser owes to its clients under section 206 of the Advisers Act.”

Of course, if this reaffirmation and clarification don’t get codified in the regulations, they are just a secondary source and will stay harder to find. The SEC did ask for comment on whether it would be beneficial to codify this interpretation. I would give that a resounding “yes.”

What does the SEC think are the obligations of an investment adviser’s fiduciary duty?

The Duty of Care and the Duty of Loyalty.

The release draws heavily from the 1963 Supreme Court case SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc. that was the landmark case holding that the Investment Advisers Act imposes a fiduciary standard on registered investment advisers.

Duty of Care

The SEC breaks down the duty of care into three prongs.

  1. the duty to act and to provide advice that is in the best interest of the client,
  2. the duty to seek best execution of a client’s transactions where the adviser has the responsibility to select broker-dealers to execute client trades, and
  3. the duty to provide advice and monitoring over the course of the relationship.

Acting in the best interest of the client is the big prong and the SEC gives lots of examples of what advisers should be doing.

  • duty to make a reasonable inquiry into a client’s financial situation, level of financial sophistication, experience, and investment objectives
  • duty to provide personalized advice that is suitable for and in the best interest of the client based on the client’s investment profile
  • update a client’s investment profile in order to adjust its advice to reflect any changed circumstances
  • have a reasonable belief that the personalized advice is suitable for and in the best interest of the client based on the client’s investment profile.
  • Take into account the costs of an investment strategy
  • Take into account the liquidity, risks and benefits, volatility and likely performance in determining if the strategy is in the best interest
  • Conduct a reasonable investigation into the investment sufficient to not base its advice on materially inaccurate or incomplete information.
  • Independently or reasonably investigate securities before recommending them to clients

Duty of Loyalty

“The duty of loyalty requires an investment adviser to put its client’s interests first. An investment adviser must not favor its own interests over those of a client or unfairly favor one
client over another.”

The SEC makes a point that in not unfairly favoring one client over another, an adviser is not locked into making pro rata allocations of opportunities.

An adviser has to try to avoid conflicts of interest with its clients, and make full and fair disclosure to its clients of all material conflicts of interest that could affect the investment advisory relationship. But disclosure of a conflict alone is not always sufficient to satisfy the adviser’s duty of loyalty. The disclosure must be clear and detailed enough for the client to understand and make an informed decision.

Commentary

What do I see as the problems with these standards?

The first is its application to private funds and private fund advisers. The proposal is targeted at retail investors and separately-managed accounts. It skips any mention of the issues related to pooled investment vehicles like private funds. In those cases the client is the fund. For some advisers, there may also be a client that invests in the fund. The needs of the various investors in a fund may vary. The fund is a client and the fund investors may not be clients.

The SEC has danced around the private fund issues of the fiduciary duty and registration requirements for a decade. With the passage of Dodd-Frank, a bigger portion of the SEC’s registered investment advisers are private funds. It seems strange to have omitted them from this release.

I also think this release fails to clarify issues around the disclosure of conflicts in dealing with the duty of loyalty. The SEC hedges its statements. I expect we will see a fair amount of comments on this issue.

Sources:

 

The New Standards for Investment Advisers and Broker-Dealers

One of the challenges that consumers face when dealing with a financial adviser is what it means to be a “financial adviser.” The terms financial planner, wealth consultant, stockbroker, investment adviser, financial consultant, and others get thrown around, leaving you how that person gets paid for helping you with your money.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is trying to help consumers with a trio of proposals.

On the Broker-Dealer side, the SEC is proposing Regulation Best Interest. This would create a new standard of conduct for broker-dealers and their representatives when making a recommendation of any securities transaction or investment strategy involving securities to a retail customer. The proposed standard of conduct is to

  • act in the best interest of the retail customer
  • at the time a recommendation is made
  • without placing the financial or other interest of the broker-dealer or natural person who is an associated person making the recommendation ahead of the interest of the retail customer

This new standard would be satisfied if:

  1. broker-dealer, before or at the time of the recommendation reasonably discloses to the retail customer, in writing, the material facts relating to the scope and terms of the relationship, and all material conflicts of interest associated with the recommendation;
  2. broker-dealer, in making the recommendation, exercises reasonable diligence, care, skill, and prudence; the broker-dealer establishes, maintains, and enforces written policies and procedures reasonably designed to identify and at a minimum disclose, or eliminate, all material conflicts of interest that are associated with such recommendations;
    and
  3. broker-dealer establishes, maintains, and enforces written policies and procedures reasonably designed to identify and disclose and mitigate, or eliminate, material conflicts of interest arising from financial incentives associated with such recommendations.

For item 1, there would be a new Form CRS. Broker-dealers would provide this to their clients.

For registered investment advisers, there would be a new Part 3 to Form ADV that would be Form CRS.

There is a lot in this package. SEC Chairman Clayton summarized them:

We propose to fill these gaps through (1) mandating clear disclosures — specifically, addressing how BDs and IAs identify themselves to investors and requiring them to provide investors with a standardized disclosure document of no more than four pages in length, highlighting among other things the principal services offered, legal standards of conduct that apply, fees the customer will pay, and certain conflicts of interest that exist, (2) raising the standard of conduct applicable to BDs to make it clear, among other things, that they cannot put their interests ahead of the interests of their retail customers, and (3) reaffirming, and in some cases clarifying, our views on the standard of conduct applicable to investment advisers.

There will be lots of commentary on these proposed regulations from all sides. One of those critics is SEC Commissioner Kara M. Stein:

 I am concerned that this rule will not only confuse retail investors, but also broker-dealers. In particular, the lack of a definition of best interest, the use of similar terms to mean different things, the use of different terms to mean the same things, and the possibility that the SEC and FINRA interpret the same language in their suitability standards differently. All of these concerns would make it difficult for the industry to discern a clear compliance path. Any resulting confusion may well result in higher compliance costs for broker-dealers, which will likely be passed onto the investor. What’s more, the lack of a clear standard is not likely to give investors more confidence in the broker-dealer business model.

There is over 1000 pages in these proposals. I’ll share more thoughts on them this week.

Sources:

Most Frequent Advisory Fee and Expense Compliance Issues

Last week, the SEC’s office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations released a risk alert on Most Frequent Advisory Fee and Expense Compliance Issues Identified in Examinations of Investment Advisers. It was a bit shocking.

Shocking mostly because the issues are mostly mechanical procedural errors that were contrary to the investment advisory agreement:

  • Using a different valuation method (cost versus fair value)
  • Using the market value at the end of the billing cycle instead of an average value
  • billing monthly instead of quarterly
  • billing in advance instead of in arrears

These are obvious mistakes, but not necessarily adverse to the client.

Others deficiencies did lead to increase costs to investors:

  • Failure to prorate for a partial billing cycle
  • Applying a higher rate
  • Charging additional fees
  • Charging more that the agreed to maximum rate
  • failing to aggregate client accounts for members of the same household which would have qualified the accounts for a discounted fee

 

Although the Risk Alert is focused on retail investment advisers, private funds do not get by unscathed.

OCIE staff has observed advisers to private and registered funds that misallocated expenses to the funds. For example, staff observed advisers that allocated distribution and marketing expenses, regulatory filing fees, and travel expenses to clients instead of the adviser, in contravention of the applicable advisory agreements, operating agreements, or other disclosures.

 

 

Happy Patriots’ Day

The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!

Patriots’ Day is a Massachusetts state holiday commemorating the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War in Lexington and Concord in April, 1775. In the morning there is a battle reenactment on the Lexington Green of the early-morning engagement between the town’s militia and the British regulars. If you remember back to U.S. history class, that battle was the shot heard round the world.

There is also a re-enactment of the rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes from Boston out to Lexington. (You don’t know about Hawes because Longfellow didn’t write a poem about him.) That ride started out with the “one if by land, two if by sea” signal to Charlestown in case Revere and Dawes were captured.

The more modern day event is the running of the Boston Marathon, starting in Hopkinton and ending 26.2 miles later in Copley Square.

What does this have to do with compliance or business ethics? Nothing. It’s a holiday here in Massachusetts so I am out of the office.

See also:

Weekend Reading: World War II at Sea

I try to keep looking for ways to interact with my kids in new ways. My son loves reading about military history, so I though I would add a book on that topic to my reading list. Reading it together would give us more things to talk about.

Oxford University Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of its upcoming release: World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds. My son and I jumped in and enjoyed this narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world’s oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945.

If that sounds like a lot. It is. At almost 800 pages, it’s a tremendous collection of the events of World War II through the lens of big steel ships.

I have to admit, I knew bits and pieces of World War II history, but I never put it all together to figure out the chronology of events and how they related to each other.

The book opens with 1930 London Conference, an early attempt at an arms treaty. The goal was to limit the tonnage of naval ships to prevent a build up in naval power among Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan. The arguments over the numbers of battleships at the beginning of the war become out of touch. Mr. Symonds shows how these limitations on naval warfare become misplaced as the strategies and purpose of the navies changed rapidly during the war. WWII brought major technological advances in warfare that radically changed naval strategy. That conference failed to address aircraft carriers. By the end of the war, aircraft carriers were the key naval strength.

World War II at Sea covers all of these major engagements and their interconnection with other aspects of the conflicts:

  • the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow
  • the Battle of the Atlantic
  • the “miracle” evacuation from Dunkirk
  • the battles for control of Norway fjords
  • Mussolini’s Regia Marina, the fourth-largest navy in the world, but ineffective for a lack a fuel
  • Japanese naval power of the Kidö Butai
  • Pearl Harbor
  • Midway
  • the forced neutrality of the French navy and eventual scuttling
  • the landings in North Africa and into Italy
  • the Normandy invasion

I found the story-telling to be top notch. It’s not easy to keep no many battles, ship and personalities in context. I found Mr. Symonds to have done a masterful job of illuminating the mechanics of large-scale warfare in water and the key role it played.

As for my son, he knew most of this information separately. He appreciated so much being put together in place to add more context to the underlying events. He felt it was too brief at times for the areas he wanted to dive more deeply into.

Compliance Bricks and Mortar for April 13

These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.

IA Arrested On Bail For Continuing Fraudulent Scheme by T. Gorman in SEC Actions

A focus of a typical bail hearing is flight risk – is the person charged likely to return for the pending court proceedings and face the charges. Recently, a long established investment adviser was arrested on fraud charges. He had three separate offices in the community. Bail was set and the adviser was released. It was soon revoked. Law enforcement officials discovered that the adviser did indeed return to the community. He also continued to fleece investors. Bail was revoked; new charges were brought; a guilty plea followed. U.S. v. Newsholme, No. 3:17-mj-05015 (D. N.J.). [More…]

Sticking Around Too Long? Dynamics of the Benefits of Dual-Class Structures by Hyunseob Kim and Roni Michaely in the CLS Blue Sky Blog

The main drawback of a dual-class share structure is, of course, that insiders who control the firm with voting rights that are disproportionately greater than their cash flow rights can easily take advantage of dispersed outside shareholders. (Co-founders Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel, for example, jointly own 45 percent of Snap shares but control more than 70 percent of votes.) Since managers-insiders control more votes relative to their cash flow rights, they may have less incentive to maximize a company’s performance and more incentive to collect perks or build an empire that is not in the best interest of other shareholders. [More…]

SEC preparing cryptocurrency fraud crackdown, Jay Clayton’s biggest enforcement move yet by Charles Gasparino in Fox Business

Since taking office, Clayton’s enforcement staff at the SEC has brought as many as nine cases involving cryptocurrency fraud, but people at the commission and securities lawyers familiar with the agency’s enforcement agenda said investigators are working on dozens more. Those cases have been trickling out in recent months, but according to securities lawyers a deluge of enforcement actions is expected sometime this year, given the immense caseload under scrutiny. [More…]

$7 Billion Hasn’t Moved The Needle on Financial Crime by Lionel Laurent Bloomberg / The Washington Post

Pan-European crime-busters Europol reckon only about 5 percent of transactions firms identify as suspicious is reported to the authorities, of which 10 percent leads to further investigation. That’s a conversion rate of less than 1 percent, suggesting banks are prophylactically over-reporting data rather than providing valuable information that that can lead to arrests. [More…]

What Drives Misconduct: The EPA Example by Matt Kelly in Radical Compliance

The lessons that compliance professionals can learn from embattled EPA administrator Scott Pruitt are many. Some are so obvious we need to step back and deconstruct them to understand why his behavior is so corrosive to the organization he supposedly wants to lead. Other lessons are more subtle, and raise the possibility that Pruitt might not get fired, despite ethical misconduct all over the place.

All these lessons, however, are of the most important sort: about how an executive loses his grip on constituencies he or she needs to run an organization effectively. That’s what your bosses dread the most, so let’s go exploring. [More…]

Is this compliance idea as bad as it sounds? by Richard L. Cassin in the FCPA Blog

In a securities filing by one of Canada’s uranium miners, the company said the CEO is responsible for “administering and interpreting” the anti-bribery policy, under the oversight of the audit committee. Should the CEO sit on top of compliance? Can he or she ever make decisions about compliance that aren’t business driven? [More…]

 

Compliance Outreach Program National Seminar 2018

I didn’t manage to get down to Washington DC to be there in person, but I’ve been watching the webcast of the Compliance Outreach Program National Seminar 2018 For Investment Adviser and Investment Company Senior Officers this morning.

This is the agenda and my notes so far.

Introductory Remarks from SEC Directors
Speakers:

  • Dalia Blass, Director, Division of Investment Management
  • Peter Driscoll, Director, Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (National Exam Program)
  • Stephanie Avakian, Co-Director, Division of Enforcement

Good policy starts with good information. To get the information you need to interact with others. The SEC wants to engage with compliance professionals to get better information to be able to make better policies.

They wanted to avoid CCO liability, but it was one of the most asked question.

One category are cases where the CCO was actively involved in the malfeasance or engaged in misleading regulators. This is the biggest category.

The second is where the CCO had a clear responsibility to implement a procedure and failed to.

There is a new alert coming out later today on fees and expenses. (Here it is:  Most Frequent Advisory Fee and Expense Compliance Issues Identified in Examinations of Investment Advisers (PDF))

Insights from SEC Leadership Regarding Program Priorities
Speakers:

  • Paul Cellupica, Deputy Director, Division of Investment Management
  • C. Dabney O’Riordan, Co-Chief, Division of Enforcement, Asset Management Unit, Los Angeles Regional Office
  • Kristin Snyder, Co-National Associate Director, National Exam Program, San Francisco Regional Office

Update on certain National Exam Initiatives
Fiscal year 2018 priorities
Update on certain fiscal year 2017 priorities

A sunshine act notice went out for a meeting on April 18. There is a continuing effort to avoid investor confusion between the different type of financial firms. The subject matters of the Open Meeting will be the Commission’s consideration of:

  • whether to propose new and amended rules and forms to require registered investment advisers and registered broker-dealers to provide a brief relationship summary to retail investors.
  • whether to propose a rule to establish a standard of conduct for broker-dealers and natural persons who are associated persons of a broker-dealer when making a recommendation of any securities transaction or investment strategy involving securities to a retail customer.
  • whether to propose a Commission interpretation of the standard of conduct for investment advisers.

The SEC will focus on ETFs. All of them are operating on exemptive orders. It makes sense to standarize the platforms instead of ad hoc rulings.

The Volker Rule is still alive and the SEC is going to keep working on it. But it sounds like the SEC wants to simplify it and remove some of the compliance burdens. Given the number of agencies involved, the SEC is just one player.

Fair Act is being considered regarding reports on various companies and wants to extend it to investment companies.

The SEC is considering a revamp of the marketing rules for investment advisers. There will be a particular focus on the anti-testimonial rule and its interaction with social media.

The share class initiative is continuing for enforcement. There was an emphasis to fix the problem before the SEC finds out if this has been an issue at your firm.

For exams, there is a focus on retail investors and in particular those saving for retirement. This includes a focus on how firms deal with older clients. The ReTIRE Initiative is still going strong. (They took great stride to point out that private fund investors are often retail investors.)

Exams are still focused on visiting firms that have never been examined. They are continuing the new registrant program.

The SEC has been learning how to use Form PF. It has been helping the SEC to inform its rule-making efforts. The experience with Form PF led to the separately-managed accounts questions on Form ADV.

Question & Answer Session 1
Speakers:

  • Ahmed Abdul-Jaleel, Assistant Regional Director, National Exam Program, Chicago Regional Office (Moderator)
  • Brian Blaha, Staff Accountant, National Exam Program, Denver Regional Office
  • Sara Cortes, Assistant Director, Division of Investment Management, Investment Adviser Regulation Office
  • Louis Gracia, Deputy Associate Regional Director, National Exam Program, Chicago Regional Office
  • Barbara Gunn, Assistant Director, Division of Enforcement, Asset Management Unit, Fort Worth Regional Office
  • Michael Spratt, Assistant Director, Division of Investment Management, Disclosure Review Office

When you get a document request list, ask questions if you are unsure what it’s asking for. If it’s going to take longer to produce the documents, let them know.

As for thoughts on the private equity fund exams and enforcement cases, does the SEC think the industry has changed? Yes. Limited partners are more informed. It’s not just fund managers, but gatekeepers who have failed to do their job of being a check on fund managers.

There was a fair amount of the liquidity rule. But since it does not apply to private funds, I’ve not been paying much attention to it or the questions about it.

One question was on anti-money laundering. It’s not the SEC who would be issuing the rules. It’s up to FinCEN. The SEC merely provides technical support.

Fees and Expenses Impacting Retail Investors
Speakers:

  • Louis Gracia, Deputy Associate Regional Director, National Exam Program, Chicago Regional Office (Moderator)
  • Adam Aderton, Assistant Director, Division of Enforcement, Asset Management Unit
  • Jennifer Porter, Branch Chief, Division of Investment Management, Investment Adviser Regulation Office
  • Nicole Tremblay, Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer, Weston Financial

Lots of this panel’s material is in the new National Exam Program Risk Alert that came out today: Most Frequent Advisory Fee and Expense Compliance Issues Identified in Examinations of Investment Advisers.

One panelist pointed out that “fees are negotiable” is generally not a good fee disclosure. Advisers should have a fee schedule.  If you let one client negotiated fees, you should state that lower fees can be negotiated.

The Sessions continue this afternoon, but I had to step away.

Fraudulent Coin Offerings

I’ve been highly critical of cryptocurrency. It doesn’t act like a currency: people are not using it to actually buy goods and service (at least not legal goods and services).  The world of coin offerings has been the wild west. In many instances, the sponsors are just ignorant of the securities law implications of their coin offering structures. Others are scams or turn quickly into scams.

The most recent coin offering to come crumbling down is the CTR Token sponsored by CentraTech. The SEC charged Sohrab Sharma and Robert Farkas with masterminding the fraudulent Initial Coin Offering.

What was the case for using Centra? I read through the whitepaper and it’s full of nothing. There is some nonsense abut currency conversion and storing coins in the Centra Wallet. As near as I can tell the only thing Centra Token did was get the boxer Floyd Mayweather to endorse it.

Centra Tech claimed that it was producing a debit card backed by Visa and MasterCard that would allow you to instantly convert hard-to-spend cryptocurrencies into U.S. dollars.  The SEC alleges that Centra had no relationships with Visa or MasterCard.

Sharma and Farkas stated that funds raised in the Initial Coin Offering would help Centra Tech build a suite of financial products. This turned it into a securities offering because the offering claimed that token holders would be paid “rewards” of 0.8% of the total revenue that Centra earned from Centra Card transactions. That makes the ICO a securities offering.

This goes back to the Howey definition of a “investment contract” as “investment in a common enterprise with the expectation of profit to be derived through the essential managerial efforts of someone other than the investor.” If it meets the definition of “investment contract” its a security.

“Endorsements and glossy marketing materials are no substitute for the SEC’s registration and disclosure requirements as well as diligence by investors.” – Steve Peikin, co-director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.

My Favorite part of the fraud is the use of fictional executives. “Michael Edwards” was listed as the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Centra, with an impressive LinkedIn profile. He had an M.B.A. from Harvard University and an extensive career in banking, most recently as a Senior VP at Wells Fargo. Edwards was not a real person. A photo of Edwards used in an early version of Centra’s website was that of a Canadian professor of Physiology and Pathophysiology with no relationship to the company. Later versions of the marketing materials included instead a picture of one of Defendant’s relatives purporting to be of “Edwards.”

The big surprise is that it took the SEC this long to build a case. The New York Times put together a profile of the company in October that was full of red flags.

Several weeks ago Sharma and Farkas received subpoenas from the SEC about the Centra ICO.  I would assume that they realized their time was short. According to the SEC’s complaint, Farkas made flight reservations to leave the country around April 1. That must be what put the SEC and the Department of Justice on an accelerated schedule. Farkas was arrested before he was able to board his flight.  Sharma was also arrested.

As of March 30, Centra’s bank accounts were depleted and most of its employees had been terminated according to the SEC complaint.

Sources: