Federal regulators have won a court order freezing the assets of financier Danny Pang (彭日成), whom they accuse of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Monday the assets of Pang’s two investment companies were also frozen. He was ordered to surrender his passports and bring back to the US any assets sent overseas.
Pang, a Taiwanese immigrant, founded a US$4 billion international investment firm and moved in A-list social circles in Los Angeles.
The SEC has accused Pang of bilking investors by falsely portraying returns as coming from investments in timeshare real estate and life insurance policies of seniors when in fact he ran a Ponzi scheme — using money raised from newer investors to pay earlier ones.
Pang’s companies, Private Equity Management Group Inc and Private Equity Management Group LLC, are based in Irvine, California.
US District Judge Philip Gutierrez in Los Angeles issued the asset freeze and appointed a receiver responsible for safeguarding assets held by Pang’s firms.
Pang’s attorney disputed the validity of the SEC move and said the agency sought the order on Friday in federal court in Los Angeles without notifying his client, depriving him of a chance to respond.
“I’m troubled that the SEC sought to litigate this in secret,” the attorney, David Schindler, said in a telephone interview.
He said Pang is cooperating with the investigation.
In a civil lawsuit, the SEC alleged Pang and his companies had engaged in the fraudulent offering of securities since 2003 or earlier, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors mostly living in Taiwan.
In one case, investors were presented with a forged US$108 million insurance policy to support a false claim that an investment was guaranteed, while the actual insurance policy was valued at US$31 million, the SEC said.
“We allege that Pang lured investors with false claims and even bogus documents to dupe them into believing their principal and interest were guaranteed and insured,” SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami said in a statement.
The SEC says its investigation is continuing.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS