US freezes Brookshire funds

NEW YORK - THE US Commodity Futures Trading Commission said on Friday it had obtained a court order freezing the assets of the Brookshire Raw Materials Management for allegedly misappropriating US$4.6 million (S$7.04 million) in a Ponzi scheme.

'(The asset freeze order), arises from a CFTC complaint filed the same day charging the defendants with misappropriating more than US$4.6 million of customer funds and destroying records, among other things,' the CFTC said in a release.

The freeze also prohibited the destruction of documents by the Barrington, Illinois, commodity pool operator, Brookshire Raw Materials Management, LLC, its principals John Marshall and Stephen Adams, as well as Brookshire Raw Materials Group Inc and Brookshire and Company Ltd, of Toronto, Ontario.

The asset freeze order was granted by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

'Between September 2006 and December 2008, Marshall, Adams, and BRM accepted millions of dollars from customers for investment in a commodity pool known as the Trust and operated as a Ponzi scheme,' the CFTC said.

A Ponzi scheme is one in which early investors are paid off with the money of new clients. Officials from Brookshire could not immediately be located for comment.

The CFTC said the fund was supposed to invest investor cash in commodity futures and forward contracts designated to 'replicate the investment methodology of corresponding indices developed and managed by Brookshire Raw Materials Group, Inc'.

Instead, more than US$5 million was wired to bank accounts in Canada, the CFTC said.

In addition, the CFTC said Marshall and Adams closed their offices in December 2008 and destroyed company data while failing to acknowledge redemption requests. -- REUTERS

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm an accountant, I hate my job, but seriously, I wouldn’t know what else to do

I was born to be a lot of things, but being an accountant isn't one of them. In my heart of hearts I have always known this, but for some stupid subconscious reason, I have always ignored it. Why? Well...um...err...I didn’t know what else to do. How many people faced with the same predicament of deciding on a profession upon graduating used “not really knowing what to do” as their guiding compass? Blink. Ten years have passed and you’re left wondering, how did I get here? In this cubicle? Doing something I cannot stand (and I’m not even honestly good at), with people I quite frankly don’t really care about? For me that was accounting, a profession that conjures numerous clichés, such as boring, bean counting, personality not needed, number crunching etc etc. These have now evolved and have been replaced by repetition, reconciliations, long hours, fudging figures, high turnover, Enron and even more reconciliations. R-E-S-P-E-C-T But please don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respe...
Read more

Three money managers who lived through the 1987 stock-market crash warn of danger today

Image
By  Philip van Doorn Published: Oct 31, 2017 1:49 p.m. ET SHARE   ‘I would take some money off now because ... there are clear signs of deranged valuations,’ says Gabelli fund manager Lawrence Haverty Getty Images A trader on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 19, 1987 — Black Monday. When the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987, investors panicked. It was an unfamiliar event — the previous decline of a similar magnitude occurred 58 years earlier, in 1929. Now, 30 years after Black Monday in 1987, there are professional investors still at work who lived through that fateful day. In interviews, three of them talked about their experiences, offered insights into warning signs and gave advice on how to handle major downturns. They are: •  Lewis Altfest , president of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, which manages about $1.3 billion for private clients. Altfest founded the firm in 1983 after working as a general partner and director of research at Lord, A...
Read more

Have We Reached a Top?

By James Kostohryz It's never been my position that the flow of fundamental news would turn from positive to negative overnight and in a total fashion. The world simply doesn't work that way. When I terminated my core long position a couple of weeks ago for reasons explained in�Ten Reasons the Countertrend Rally May Be Over,�I outlined a series of factors I believe may manifest in the later half of 2009 and the first half of 2010. Indeed, most of these factors will be more back-end loaded, as negative factors tend to build on one another and gain momentum in time through the medium of psychology and social mood. It's my view that the flow of economically relevant events�-- and perceptions of these events --are in the early stages of a transition. In this case, a transition means the flow of relatively good news will tend to wane somewhat while there's an uptick in relatively bad news. This is what one would expect at a top. However, it's to be expected that during t...
Read more