News Releases

The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) reported Sept. 26 that state securities regulators took more enforcement actions against registered members of the securities industry than non-registered individuals or firms, continuing a trend that began last year. In its 2017...

Austin attorney Robert Allen Helms and his business partner, Janniece S. Kaelin , were each sentenced to 78 months in federal prison on Sept. 12 for stealing millions of dollars from investors who sank money into an oil-and-gas royalties scam. Helms and Kaelin had pleaded guilty on April 11 to...

The Unicorn is paying the price for his financial crimes. Nicholas Baratoff Jr. , a resident of the coastal village of Sea Cliff, N.Y., near New York City, paid $360,000 in restitution on Sept. 6 to an elderly Corpus Christi woman who invested in projects that were supposedly operated by a company...

In the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey, the Texas State Securities Board is cautioning investors to watch out for opportunistic investment scams. "We know from experience that disasters can bring out scammers who seek to profit from the misfortune of others,” Texas Securities...

The Texas State Securities Board on Aug. 1 appointed Travis J. Iles as Securities Commissioner, effective Sept. 1. Iles, a 16-year veteran of the agency, has served as Deputy Commissioner since September 2016. He previously served as Assistant Director of the Enforcement Division and worked as an...

Michael Keith Parish , a San Antonio investment adviser, has been suspended for 30 days and fined $5,000 for for violating Texas State Securities Board rules regarding custody of client funds. Texas Securities Commissioner John Morgan entered the Disciplinary Order on July 18. Parish violated the...

The following are summaries of administrative actions and orders taken from April 1 through June 30, 2017. Trevor M. Carney: Fined, Reprimanded Securities Commissioner John Morgan entered a Disciplinary Order on June 21 that fined and reprimanded Trevor M. Carney , a securities agent in Austin, for...

Lawrence Allen DeShetler, an investment adviser and former certified financial planner in The Woodlands, pleaded guilty to mail fraud June 8 in U.S. District Court in Beaumont, Acting U.S. Attorney Brit Featherston announced. DeShetler fraudulently obtained $1.9 million from five clients of his...

Securities Commissioner John Morgan entered a Disciplinary Order June 2 that fined and reprimanded a Chicago-based securities dealer whose compliance officer repeatedly wired funds to individuals pretending to be a 75-year-old Texas client of the firm. In three separate transactions in 2015, Daniel...

Nearly $341,000 in restitution has been paid to investors in a company whose fraud stretched from Southeast Asia to southeast Texas to West Africa. Alan Derek Jernigan , who sold investments in deals that would purportedly export medical test kits to the Philippines and Malaysia, was sentenced to 10...