A Connecticut funding advisor faces as much as 25 years in jail after pleading responsible to cherry-picking shares and defrauding purchasers of greater than $2.7 million.
Jonathan Vincent Glenn, the CEO of Greenwich, Conn.-based agency Glenn Capital, pleaded responsible this week in federal courtroom to 1 depend of securities fraud, one month after he and the agency settled SEC fees relating to the identical conduct.
Glenn entered the trade in 1993, with a run of transient stints on the 4 main wirehouses earlier than founding Glenn Capital in 2018, in keeping with his IAPD profile.
Because the agency’s sole advisor, he managed all shopper accounts, aiding prospects with portfolio administration providers (together with asset choice and allocation), in keeping with the DOJ. He’d achieve this by direct trades in particular person accounts or by putting block trades within the agency’s omnibus account and divvying the trades amongst particular person accounts afterward.
Glenn was required to doc particular allocations for every block commerce earlier than executing it and to allocate block trades to all particular person accounts at a mean worth, however Glenn started cherry-picking, which includes a dealer not assigning trades to explicit accounts till they know whether or not it’s worthwhile. By doing so, a dealer can order the worthwhile trades into sure accounts whereas leaving different purchasers holding the bag on the unprofitable ones.
As part of the responsible plea, Glenn admitted that he moved worthwhile trades into the accounts for sure purchasers, together with household and his personal private accounts, whereas shifting unprofitable trades to different purchasers.
Based on the SEC, the chance that the favored accounts would obtain these worthwhile trades by probability was “statistically practically zero.” In whole, Glenn defrauded 49 purchasers, in keeping with the Justice Division.
Throughout a lot of this time, Glenn Capital executed its trades by means of an unnamed dealer/supplier, however that enterprise notified the agency in March 2022 that they’d terminated Glenn’s entry to the omnibus account and had been ending the connection altogether, because of “issues” about Glenn’s buying and selling, in keeping with the SEC settlement order. Glenn then requested purchasers to maneuver their accounts to a separate unnamed dealer/supplier, which didn’t permit advisors to make use of omnibus accounts.
Glenn was launched till his sentencing date, which is scheduled for Dec. 28.
