The daughter of a convicted N.Y. broker was sentenced to 80 months in prison for her role in a Ponzi scheme that robbed 15 clients of more than $11 million, according to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Vania May Bell, 57, of Montvale, N.J., was sentenced yesterday by U.S. District Judge Nelson S. Roman. She also was ordered to serve three years of supervised release, pay $8,041,233 in restitution, and forfeit $589,942. She pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Bell was the former comptroller and chief compliance officer of Executive Compensation Planners, Inc. (ECP), a New City, N.Y.-based registered investment adviser and financial planning firm, that was led by her father, Hector May, who served as president.
May, 81, pleaded guilty in December 2018 to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and investment advisor fraud. He was sentenced on July 31, 2019, to 13 years in prison. He also was ordered to serve three years of supervised release, pay $8,041,233 in restitution, and forfeit $11,452,185.
According to the court document, May began providing financial advisory services to clients in 1982 and in 1993, Bell joined the company. The court said May became a registered representative of Securities America Advisors in 1994, which, as ECP’s broker-dealer, facilitated the buying and selling of securities for May’s clients. Securities America and associated clearing firms, maintained securities accounts for ECP’s clients and, through those accounts, held ECP’s clients’ money, executed their securities trades, produced account statements reflecting activity in the clients’ accounts, and forwarded these account statements to ECP’s clients, the court documents said.
The court said because May did not have the authority to withdraw money directly from the investors’ securities accounts, he, with the assistance of Bell, persuaded them to withdraw money from the accounts themselves and forward it to the ECP custodial account to have ECP, rather than the broker-dealer, purchase bonds on their behalf. He also told them that by purchasing bonds through ECP directly, they could avoid transaction fees, prosecutors said.
When the money arrived in the ECP custodial account, the court said May and Bell transferred the funds to ECP’s “operating” account and spent it on business expenses, personal expenses and to make payments to certain clients in order to perpetuate the scheme and conceal the fraud.
Prosecutors said May and Bell created fake consolidated account statements that they issued through ECP and sent to the clients, documents that included portfolio balances, the names of bonds May claimed to have bought for the clients and interest he claimed they were getting. Bell, prosecutors said, created ECP computerized account statements with the false information she received from May and had them distributed to the investors.
The court said May even “drove to the home of a stroke victim he and Bell had been defrauding of millions of dollars in order to retrieve the legitimate statements being sent by [Securities America] and later replaced them with Bell’s fake consolidated statements purporting to show the victim’s investments had been growing.”
Prosecutors said Bell kept track of the loot by processing the investors’ payments for the purported bonds, entered them in a computerized accounting program and, through that program, kept track of how she and May received and spent the stolen money, which amounted to $11.4 million from the late 1990’s through March 9, 2018.