A hedge fund manager in Beverly Hills, California, bilked investors out of about US$44 million while claiming annual returns of as much as 60 percent, US prosecutors said.
Bradley Ruderman, 46, was taken into custody on Friday morning after he surrendered to federal agents, US Attorney Thomas O’Brien said in a statement.
Ruderman, the founder and manager of Ruderman Capital Partners, faces as long as 20 years in prison if convicted of wire fraud, according to the statement.
The fund manager raised US$44.3 million over the past eight years from 22 investors, mostly family members, according to the statement. Ruderman sent a letter to the investors last month saying the funds were almost depleted, prosecutors said.
Ruderman spent US$8.7 million of the money on personal expenses, including two Porsches and US$5.2 million he lost in clandestine poker games, prosecutors said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ruderman on April 30 and got an emergency court order freezing his assets.
Ruderman falsely claimed that Lowell Milken, chairman of the Milken Family Foundation, and Oracle Corp chief executive officer Larry Ellison were investors in his funds, the SEC said.
He also made at least one Ponzi-like payment earlier this year when an investor sought to withdraw US$750,000 and Ruderman transferred funds raised from two new investors, the SEC said.
Ruderman was released on US$500,000 bail on Friday afternoon, FBI spokesman Laura Eimiller said in an e-mailed statement.
UK ARRESTS TWO
Meanwhile, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) arrested two men on Friday in a probe into collapsed hedge fund Weavering Capital, which it said used swaps to artificially inflate its value.
The watchdog searched two houses in Kent and Surrey, and the two men, aged 43 and 45, were taken to a police station for questioning, it said.
An SFO spokesman declined to name the two, the first arrests of hedge fund managers in the UK since the start of the credit crisis. No further arrests were expected for the moment.
Liquidators to the Weavering Macro Fixed Income hedge fund were appointed in March after the firm told investors it had unearthed a large interest rate swap position where the counterparty was a firm related to Weavering.
The investigation is focused on the swaps, which “inflated the apparent net asset value of the Macro fund,” and were between the fund and a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, Weavering Capital Fund Limited, the SFO said.
UNCERTAINTIES: Exports surged 34.1% and private investment grew 7.03% to outpace expectations in the first half, although US tariffs could stall momentum The Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast to 3.05 percent this year on a robust first-half performance, but warned that US tariff threats and external uncertainty could stall momentum in the second half of the year. “The first half proved exceptionally strong, allowing room for optimism,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “But the growth momentum may slow moving forward due to US tariffs.” The tariff threat poses definite downside risks, although the scale of the impact remains unclear given the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s policies, Lien said. Despite the headwinds, Taiwan is likely
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
READY TO BUY: Shortly after Nvidia announced the approval, Chinese firms scrambled to order the H20 GPUs, which the company must send to the US government for approval Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) late on Monday said the technology giant has won approval from US President Donald Trump’s administration to sell its advanced H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) used to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to China. The news came in a company blog post late on Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run China Global Television Network in remarks shown on X. “The US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said. “Today, I’m announcing that the US government has approved for us