New York (HedgeCo.Net) – The SEC has frozen the assets and announced charges against the perpetrators of a Texas-based Ponzi scheme involving purported investments in oil and gas projects.
“Robert A. Helms and Janniece S. Kaelin misled investors about their experience in the oil and gas industry while raising nearly $18 million for supposed purchases of oil and gas royalty interests.” The SEC said, “Despite representations that nearly all of the money they raised would be used to make oil and gas investments, Helms and Kaelin actually used only a fraction of the offering proceeds for that purpose. Instead, the vast majority of investor funds were used to make Ponzi payments and cover various personal and business expenses.”
According to the SEC’s complaint, Helms and Kaelin began offering investments in 2011 through Vendetta Royalty Partners. They have since attracted at least 80 investors in more than a dozen states while promising in offering documents that they would use more than 99 percent of the investment proceeds to acquire a lucrative portfolio of oil and gas royalty interests. The offering documents were fraudulent as Helms and Kaelin invested only 10 percent of the proceeds, and the oil and gas projects in which they actually did invest generated only minuscule returns.
The SEC alleges that Helms and Kaelin directed Vendetta Royalty Partners to make approximately $5.9 million in so-called partnership income distributions to investors. They used money from newer investors to make the distributions to earlier investors. Helms and Kaelin created the illusion that Vendetta Royalty Partners was a profitable enterprise when, in fact, it was a fraudulent Ponzi scheme.
The court set a temporary restraining order on the defendants, freezing their assets, prohibiting the destruction of documents, requiring them to provide an accounting, and authorizing expedited discovery.
Alex Akesson
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