Danny Pang (彭日成), the Private Equity Management Group Inc financier who the US government claims defrauded Taiwanese investors, was paid US$83.1 million in fees and loans from 2004 to this year, court filings showed.
The payments uncovered by court receiver Robert Mosier, who is quantifying the assets of Pang and PEMGroup, amount to US$20.8 million more than Mosier previously reported, court documents said. The payments to Pang accelerated so that he was paid US$70.8 million of the total US$83.1 million from 2006 through last year, Mosier said in the filing.
The assets of Pang and PEMGroup, based in Irvine, California, were frozen in April by an emergency court order after the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused him of defrauding investors. Pang and his companies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily from investors in Taiwan, according to the SEC.
Mosier’s filing contains “salacious allegations,” Pang said in a legal response objecting to what he called “mischaracterizations and false impressions” in the report.
“The statement that a total of US$83.1 million was paid to Mr Pang is demonstrably false” and should be removed from the court record, Pang’s lawyer said in the filing. A “significant part of the amounts reportedly distributed to Mr Pang were actually paid to persons not affiliated with Mr Pang.”
Pang said US$19.6 million of the US$83.1 million total was sent to PEMGroup’s senior management. Pang said another US$4.2 million isn’t unaccounted for, the receiver’s records showed.
US District Judge Philip Gutierrez was scheduled to hold a hearing in Los Angeles yesterday to consider, among other things, Pang’s request to remove Mosier as receiver in the case.
Gutierrez issued the emergency order April 27, after the SEC accused Pang of lying to Taiwanese investors about his credentials, forging insurance documents and paying existing investors with funds raised from new ones, while claiming the returns came from investments in life insurance policies.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to