South Florida Arbitration & Litigation Lawyer Blog
Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a South Florida attorney with aiding and abetting, through the issuance of fraudulent opinion letters, a previously-charged $322 million fraud allegedly perpetrated by a now bankrupt Florida-based cash advance company, 1 Global Capital LLC, its former CEO, and its former CFO on 3,600 retail investors. The SEC also previously charged an unregistered broker for his allegedly unlawful sale of 1 Global securities.
According to the SEC’s complaint, filed in federal district court in Miami, Jan D. Atlas, while a partner at a Fort Lauderdale-based law firm that was acting as outside counsel to 1 Global, drafted two opinion letters in which he knowingly falsified or omitted important facts and offered the opinion that 1 Global’s notes likely were not securities. The complaint alleges that 1 Global used the opinion letters to falsely represent to a network of external sales agents that its notes were not securities and that its offering did not have to be registered with the SEC. 1 Global then allegedly induced thousands of retail investors to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in its notes. According to the complaint, Atlas received a percentage of the commissions generated on the sale of 1 Global’s notes, which totaled more than $600,000.
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