AlphaBridge Capital Management will pay $5 million to settle SEC charges.
The Greenwich-based fund, run by Thomas Kutzen and Michael Carino, was charged with fraud for inflating the price of securities in their portfolios, reports Greenwich Time. The fund and Kutzen were censured by the SEC, and Carino was barred from working in the securities industry for at least three years. AlphaBridge will close its funds after it returns more than $4 million to investors and pays $1 million in fines.
Independent broker-dealer representative Richard Evans was also charged by the SEC for his part in the pricing scheme. He will pay $15,000 in fines, and has been barred from the industry for at least one year. He was fired from his broker-dealer job in 2013 and has been out of the industry since.
The SEC says that AlphaBridge deceived auditors in 2011 and 2012, making it seem as though Evans had independently given price-quotes to the firm. Instead, Carino created the data himself, and wrote Evans responses to the auditors’ questions.
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