Bitzio, Inc. (fka BTZO)

[jjwood]

Info on the new finance company, Lots of good reading. Hubert sold out his shareholders, IMO


http://moneytometal.org/index.php/Yorkville_Advisors

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mark Angelo and his formerly $1 billion Jersey City, N.J., hedge fund firm, Yorkville Advisors, with fraud on Wednesday, alleging they overvalued assets under management and exaggerated returns.

The tactics of Yorkville Advisors have been the subject of several Forbes articles, which noted that one Yorkville fund, YA Global Investment Fund I, never had a down month from February 2001 to July 2008 until a stunning reversal saw it report a drop of 33% in 2010, most of it in the single month of December 2010, suggesting a big mark-to-market adjustment while the stock market was rising. Forbes reported in 2010 that Yorkville had disclosed to investors that it had provided information to the SEC at the direction of securities regulators.

The SEC claims that Yorkville did not adhere to its own stated valuation policies and ignored negative information about certain investments by the funds. Yorkville also withheld adverse information about fund investments from Yorkville’s auditor, which allowed Yorkville to carry some of its largest investments at inflated values, the SEC says. The SEC also charged Yorkville’s chief financial officer Edward Schinik with securities fraud.

According to the 35-page complaint the SEC filed in federal court in Manhattan, Angelo made Yorkville’s funds seem more attractive through fraudulent means in order to attract new investors, resulting in more than $280 million from pension funds and funds of funds that allowed Yorkville to charge the funds more than $10 million in excess fees based on the bogus asset valuations.

For many years, Yorkville Advisors was one of the biggest hedge fund firms specializing in making private investments in public equities, mostly in penny stocks, and consistently posted positive returns. It set up shop in one of Jersey City’s most exclusive office buildings with spectacular views of New York Harbor and hired on its staff a former SEC lawyer, David Fine, who was senior legal counsel at the SEC’s enforcement division in New York, where he investigated PIPE deals.

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