Rocky Mountain News – The former Denver Broncos players liked the investment pitch, pouring millions of dollars into the Atlanta-based hedge funds.
Now they say they were burned.
Steve Atwater, Terrell Davis and Ray Crockett, along with other investors including current Broncos wide receiver Rod Smith, have filed a lawsuit in Georgia against International Management Associates, saying the firm and its fund managers committed fraud and forgery and failed to return their money.
Clyde Simmons, who played with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Chicago Bears, among other teams, and Blaine Bishop, a former Eagle and Tennessee Titan, entrusted money to the firm, too, the lawsuit said.
The football players listed a host of complaints in the lawsuit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court.
International Management Associates claimed its hedge funds would aim to maximize gains and minimize risk and would not keep more than 10 percent of a fund’s assets in a single security.
The firm’s principals also said that “although the fund would partake in risky investment practices such as ‘short-selling’ stock, the fund’s reliance upon such practices would be limited,” the lawsuit read.
However, the managers exposed investors to “intolerably high risks,” with about two-thirds of two funds’ assets devoted to short-selling the stock of just one company, Time Warner, the document alleged.
