Recover Your EquiAlt Investment Losses!

Robert Wayne Pearce, P.A. is investigating and representing investors against brokerage firms and financial advisors who offered and sold securities issued by affiliates of EquiAlt, LLC.  EquiAlt is a private real estate company which organized at least four private placements: EquiAlt Fund, LLC; EquiAlt Fund II, LLC; EquiAlt Fund III, LLC; and EA Sip, LLC (collectively referred to as the EquiAlt Funds).  According to a recent SEC Complaint, EquiAlt CEO Brian Davison and Managing Director Barry Rybicki offered and sold $170 million of unregistered debentures issued by the EquiAlt Funds to over 1,100 investors across the United States. The SEC Complaint alleged that Brian Davison, Barry Rybicki, and others misrepresented the unregistered debentures as “safe,” “low risk,” and “conservative.”  Also, while investors were promised “that substantially all of their money would be used to purchase real estate in distressed markets in the United States and their investments would yield generous returns … EquiAlt, Davison, and Rybicki misappropriated millions in investor funds for their own personal use and benefit.”  According to the SEC Complaint, the revenues generated by the EquiAlt Funds became insufficient to pay the interest owed to investors.  Because of this insufficiency, the SEC alleged the Defendants resorted to fraud (a Ponzi scheme), using new money from investors to pay the returns promised to existing investors. While many of the sales were solicited by unregistered EquiAlt salespersons, there were reportedly many sales by small offices of registered salespersons associated with large independent FINRA-registered brokerage and insurance firms in Arizona, California, Nevada, and many other states nationwide.

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The Law Offices of Robert Wayne Pearce P.A. Wins $1.45 Million Plus Interest Award Against UBS Financial Services and UBS Puerto Rico

In an arbitration proceeding against UBS Financial Services, Inc. (UBS) and UBS Financial Services, Inc. of Puerto Rico (UBS-PR), the Law Offices of Robert Wayne Pearce, P. A. won a $1.45 million plus interest award for one of the firm’s clients this week. The case arose from a series of unsuitable investment recommendations made by a UBS and a UBS-PR financial advisor that our client purchase and hold an excessive concentration of UBS-PR closed-end bond funds in a leveraged UBS-PR account. Because of the financial advisors’ unsuitable recommendations, our client’s investment was not diversified from an asset allocation standpoint and also from a concentration standpoint, as the portfolio was overconcentrated in a single geographic area, namely, Puerto Rico.

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