Securities Lawyers Blog
The law offices of Gana Weinstein LLP are investigating Premium Point Investments, LP (Premium Point) and allegations made by The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announcing that it has charged the New York based investment adviser with inflating the value of private funds it advised by over $200 million dollars. In the complaint the SEC also charged Premium Point’s CEO Anilesh Ahuja (Ahuja) and Amin Majidi (Majidi), a former partner and portfolio manager at the firm, among others charged.
According to the complaint, Premium Point described itself as focused on investment opportunities in securities, mortgages, loans, real property, and consumer receivables. However, the fund did not perform well the SEC alleged it ran a scheme from at least September 2015 through March 2016 by inflating the value of its portfolio to hide the poor performance. The fund purportedly engaged in a secret deal where in exchange for sending trades to a broker-dealer, Premium Point received inflated broker quotes for certain mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Another deceptive technique was the alleged use of imputed mid-point valuations that further inflated the value of securities.
Premium Point’s fraud began to unravel after its auditor questioned the valuation practices in 2015. At that time Premium Point told investors it had overvalued all of its funds by 13 percent to 15 percent from September 2015 to March 2016. However, there are substantial variation between funds and Premium’s flagship fund – the Mortgage Credit Hedge Fund, is alleged to have been mismarked by as much as 24 percent dating back to at least January 2014.