The government filed a case Tuesday against one of the most reckless investors in recent memory.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed papers charging investment adviser Neal R. Greenberg of Boulder, Colo., with fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. Greenberg flushed some $174 million of client funds down the drain by pouring them into not one but two giant Ponzi schemes, the SEC said.
Greenberg raked in millions of dollars in fees by swapping income-seeking retirees out of annuities and into his risky, highly concentrated, opaque funds — all the while insisting his strategies would afford the “peace of mind you need to sleep well at night,” the SEC said.
The SEC said Greenberg didn’t just invest with Bernie Madoff, who was sent away last year for running the biggest pyramid scheme in history. He also sent millions of dollars in client money to Tom Petters, the Minneapolis fraudster who made off with billions of dollars in an incredible appliance resale scheme.
And just for good measure, Greenberg called one of his funds the “Agile Safety Variable Fund.”
Greenberg’s clients notably included a former congressman, Tom Tancredo of Arizona, and a talk radio show host, Mike Rosen. Despite Greenberg’s impressive ineptitude and his far-fetched claims, the right-wing stalwarts offered this stirring endorsement last year in an on-air discussion, the Denver Post reported:
“I’ll attribute the blame to Petters and Madoff because they appear to be thieves,” Rosen said. “You can also blame the international market bubble in commodities and everything else. You can blame the financial collapse … You can say that people managing hedge funds, including Neal, bet on some of the wrong horses … But I have no reason to believe that while Petters and Madoff are crooks that Neal Greenberg is too.”
“It started primarily with the collapse of Lehman Brothers,” Tancredo said. “Once it started, it was just like a house of cards.”
Unfortunately, many of those hit when the house of cards collapsed were older investors of lesser means than Tancredo and Rosen. A class action suit filed last year against Greenberg and the insurance company that sold the annuities in question described the victims this way:
Plaintiffs are primarily older, hardworking citizens of Colorado who, through many years of effort, had compiled a reasonable nest egg for their retirement. Plaintiffs entrusted their retirement monies to Greenberg upon his assurance that he would safely invest those assets for them. Now, through the greed and wrongful conduct of Greenberg and AGL, Plaintiffs’ lives have been devastated and their retirement dreams have been destroyed.
The funds haven’t closed, but they haven’t allowed redemptions since September 2008 and the SEC says the outlook isn’t good for those who entrusted Greenberg with their savings.
To date, no redemptions have been allowed by the Safety Fund, the Variable Fund, and International Fund, and investors likely have lost most, and possibly all, of their investments in these funds. Some investors have lost most or all of their retirement savings.
Greenberg’s lawyer, Steven Feder of the Feder Law Firm in Denver, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.