Rocky Mountain News – The former Denver Broncos players liked the investment pitch, pouring millions of dollars into the Atlanta-based hedge funds.<\/p>\n
Now they say they were burned.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The football players listed a host of complaints in the lawsuit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n