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SEC and FBI announce 13 charged in securities kickback schemes
by Joseph Earnest December 1, 2011
Newscast Media Washington, D.C., — The Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, and Federal Bureau of Investigation today announced parallel cases filed in federal court against several corporate officers, lawyers and a stock promoter alleging they used kickbacks and other schemes to trigger investments in various thinly-traded stocks.
The criminal case charged 13 defendants who engaged in criminal activity in the midst of an undercover FBI operation. According to the charges filed in U.S. District Court, the schemes involved secret kickbacks to an investment fund representative in exchange for having the investment fund buy stock in certain companies; the kickbacks were to be concealed through the use of sham consulting agreements. What the insiders and promoters did not know was that the purported investment fund representative was actually an undercover agent.
The criminal defendants include Kelly Black-White and James Prange, both of whom were in the business of finding capital for emerging companies. The civil case names some of the individuals who were charged criminally, and the SEC also issued trading suspensions in the stocks of a number of the companies involved in the criminal cases.
The charges follow a year-long investigation focusing on preventing fraud in the micro-cap stock markets. The full SEC report can be found here.
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