Massachusetts district court has sentenced former hedge fund manager Mark R. Conway to seven years in prison and three years of supervised release for defrauding investors out of $20 million.
The court also ordered Conway to pay a $1,300 fine and $20 million in restitution. On October 23, 2006, Conway pled guilty to 13 counts of wire and mail fraud in connection with his scam. According to the SEC, the District Attorney's office has taken $15 million from Conway's bank accounts to be returned to the roughly 50 investors who put money into his bogus Groundswell Partners and Groundswell Capital investments.
The Commission based a large portion of its case against Conway on a tape-recorded phone conversation with Conway's Groundswell partner, Aaron Behle. During the October 26, 2005 conversation, Conway admitted to Behle that he had used the fund to defraud investors from roughly 2000 or 2001 to October 2005.
Conway also admitted that he had taken a sizeable position in a stock and lost a large amount of the fund's money, and that he had changed his investment strategy without notifying investors. The original investment strategy was purportedly based on quantitative and mathematical algorithms that capitalized on daily price movements in order to earn incremental positive daily returns.
In the course of the taped conversation, Conway also told Behle that he concealed the huge losses incurred by the fund by altering financial statements, profit-and-loss spreadsheets, and account statements to investors, which falsely inflated the amount of assets in investors' accounts. Conway falsely told investors that the fund's assets were at roughly $43 million, when they were closer to $14 million.
Because Conway's salary was based partly on annual 1% commission of the amount of assets under his management, which he fraudulently overstated, he also overcharged investors for his advisory services, charged the complaint.
To keep the fraud going, Conway also created a fictitious auditor, complete with a made-up email account, for the purpose of creating fraudulent auditing reports for the fund, stated the complaint.
The day after his taped conversation, Conway phoned the Commission's Boston District Office. He told a staffer that he wished to turn himself into SEC Enforcement the next day for an unspecified fraud that he had committed. But according to the regulator, Conway failed to appear at the Boston District Office.
As for Groundswell Partners and Groundswell Capital LP, the Commission obtained default judgments against both entities on June 30, 2006. The company was also ordered to pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest totaling more than $21 million. The court permanently enjoined Groundswell Partners from further violations of the federal securities laws.
Conway's sentencing is the end of just one of several actions taken by the Commission related to hedge fund fraud this year.
In May, the U.S. District Court in Boston enforced an asset freeze on hedge fund Lydia Capital and its two owners. The SEC had charged the defendants with defrauding over 60 clients who had invested approximately $34 million in the fund. In that case, the Court froze over $13 million in assets.
Earlier this year, a Georgia District Court fined an Atlanta-based hedge fund manager $20 million for his part in a fraudulent offering that bilked over 500 investors, including some professional football players, out of close to $185 million. At the time, the former hedge fund manager was already in jail on 23 counts of money laundering and 24 counts of mail and securities fraud.
