Securities Lawyers Blog
The investment attorneys at Gana Weinstein LLP are investigating the potential unsuitable sales of securities sponsored by Bradford Energy Capital (Bradford). Bradford claims on its website that the company was formed in 1994 to focus on creating investment opportunities in the the oil and natural gas industry. Bradford Exploration, Inc., Bradford Energy, LLC, and Bradford Energy Capital, LLC have been the managing general partner of 42 limited partnerships which investing more than $270 million in approximately 2,000 oil and natural gas wells, natural gas processing plants, natural gas pipelines, mineral leases, and royalty interests. Bradford is active in the Appalachian Basin, the Illinois Basin, the Permian and the Western Gulf Basins, and the Williston Basin.
The company sponsors many oil and gas private placements and investments that incorporate Bradford Drilling Associates into the name. According to public disclosures, brokerage firms that sell Bradford oil and gas interests include Centarus Financial Inc., Commonwealth Financial Network, Sigma Financial Corporation, Sammons Securities, Madison Avenue Securities, Inc, M Financial Holdings Securities, Inc., Lincoln Investment Planning, Berthel Fsher & Company Financial Services Inc., Kalos Capital, Inc., G.F. Investment Services LLC, and Sethi Financial among others.
Investors often do not understand the substantial risks of oil and gas limited partnerships and private placements. As recently reported in Reuters, when offerings by Atlas Energy LP, another issuer of oil and gas private placements were analyzed, investors only get to see 65-70% of their capital actually put to work on oil and gas projects. Further, the returns on these projects had more in common with running profitable casinos than investments. Reuters found that slightly more than half of 43 private placements Atlas issued over the past three decades investors lost money or just broke even. While investors lost in more than half of the deals in 29 or 67% of those deals, Atlas actually out-performed their own investors.