A unit of Allianz SE agreed to plead guilty to fraud and pay $5.8 billion after misrepresenting the risk posed by a group of its hedge funds that collapsed amid pandemic market gyrations.
Allianz Global Investors US, which is wholly owned by the German insurance giant, will plead guilty to a single count of securities fraud and will pay, along with its parent company, more than $5 billion to victims. The total payout, including a $1 billion fine to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is covered by provisions the company has already taken, it said.
Allianz plans to sell the bulk of the US piece of its Allianz Global Investors business to Voya Financial Inc.
Gregoire Tournant, the former chief investment officer and co-lead portfolio manager of the Structured Alpha Funds, was taken into custody Tuesday and charged separately for his role in the alleged scheme to defraud investors, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. Tournant and two other portfolio managers overstated the level of independent oversight AGI was providing, misrepresented hedging and other risk mitigation strategies and altered documents to hide the riskiness of the funds, according to prosecutors.
“As a result of this scheme to defraud, investors’ funds were exposed to higher risk than promised, and investors were deprived of information about the true risks to which their investments were exposed,” according to the Tournant’s indictment.
The agreement calls for the firm to forfeit $463 million and pay $3.2 billion in restitution to victims of the fraud as well as a $2.3 billion penalty. It will get a credit for $1.9 billion that has already been paid to victims.
Allianz had set aside 5.6 billion euros ($5.9 billion) to resolve the lawsuits and government probes tied to the funds. The charges are a “fair estimate” of the exposure, the company said earlier this month. All charges announced Tuesday are covered by the provisions, an Allianz spokesman said.
AGI is due to make the forfeiture payment on Wednesday and will make the restitution payments within a week into an escrow account that will be distributed to victims.
‘Master Cop’
“No one at AGI US or Allianz was verifying that Tournant and his colleagues were actually adhering to the investment strategies promised to investors,” according to Tournant’s indictment. “For example, no risk or compliance personnel at AGI US verified, attempted to verify, or were responsible for verifying that Tournant and his colleagues were purchasing hedging positions within the range that was represented to investors, or adhering to other agreed upon risk mitigation strategies, including those specifically promised to the funds’ largest investor.”
Tournant told investors that Allianz was “one of the largest and most conservative insurance companies in the world” and was monitoring every position that he took as a “master cop,” according to the court filing.
The Structured Alpha hedge funds were designed to provide protection against a market crash yet incurred steep hits during the tumultuous early days of the pandemic. Following a controversial options strategy, five Florida-based funds lost between 49% and 97% of their value during the first quarter of 2020. Investors said they lost billions of dollars. Allianz liquidated two of the vehicles in March 2020 and has been unwinding the others.