Recently, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) has devoted significant regulatory oversight to one financial product that is rife with potential for abuse: the variable annuity (“VA”). As a general rule, annuities are treated as insurance products. Accordingly, annuities are subject to regulation at the State level. Specifically, each State…
Investors in VGTel, Inc. (“VGTel”) (OTC PINK: VGTL) may be able to recover their losses through initiating a securities arbitration proceeding with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) if they were sold VGTel shares via misrepresentations or if a stockbroker or financial advisor made an unsuitable recommendation to purchase VGTel…
Summit Healthcare REIT Inc. (“Summit”), a publicly registered non-traded real estate investment trust, has recommended to shareholders that they reject a third-party tender offer by MacKenzie Realty Capital to purchase shares for $1.34 a share. The REIT estimates its net asset value per share as $2.53, and therefore says…
On July 16, 2017, the Wall Street Journal published an article – From $2 Billion to Zero: A Private-Equity Fund Goes Bust in the Oil Patch – discussing the financial distress besetting Houston based EnerVest Ltd. (“EnerVest”), a private equity firm focused on energy investments. Essentially, the article discussed how…
Oil and gas private placements use some of investors’ money to drill and operate oil and gas wells. Oil and gas DPPs are sponsored and managed either by investment companies or oil and gas exploration companies, each of which may suffer from its own conflicts of interests in structuring the…
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has filed two recent enforcement actions that may signal a crackdown on variable annuity (VA) misconduct this year, continuing a 2016 trend of high fines related to VA sales in 2016. In the first disciplinary proceeding, FINRA reportedly suspended broker Cecil E. Nivens for…
Recently, the North American Securities Administrators Association (“NASAA”) released a timely survey entitled ‘Seniors & Financial Exploitation’ (the “Survey”). The Survey, which was conducted among NASAA’s membership of 67 state, provincial and territorial securities administrators in all 50 States, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, in…
Business Development Corporation of America (“BDCA”) is a non-traded business development company headquartered in New York, New York. As a business development company (“BDC”), BDCA focuses on providing flexible financing solutions to various middle market companies (e.g., BDCA extended a second lien term loan in August 2016 to the well-known…
Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) initiated an action against 40-year old Leon Vaccarelli by filing a sixteen-page complaint (“SEC Complaint”) in federal court in New Haven, CT. The SEC is alleging that Mr. Vaccarelli, based in Waterbury, CT, engaged in operating a Ponzi Scheme for more than four…
Investors who have suffered losses due to the recommendation of a stockbroker or financial advisor to invest in the hedge fund Astenbeck Master Commodities Fund II (“Astenbeck II”) may be able to recover losses through FINRA arbitration if the investment recommendation was unsuitable, or the nature of the investment was…