Former LPL advisor Roger S. Zullo has been barred from the securities industry for a third time in connection with charges that he ran a $1.8 million annuities scam.
Zullo was barred from the industry as part of an agreement on Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued him in connection with the sheme.
Zullo, a registered representative with LPL Financial from 2004 to 2016, is a resident of Newton, Mass.
In April 2017, the office of Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin barred Zullo from registering or associating with an advisor or brokerage firm registered with the SEC or the state.
According to Massachusetts regulators, Zullo used false suitability information on annuity and account applications to sell disproportionately large variable annuities to his clients.
From January 1, 2013, to December 1, 2016, Zullo accumulated more than $1.8 million in commissions from the sale of variable annuities, according to Galvin’s office, typically through 401(k) and 403(b) rollover recommendations.
Most of the sales were of AMG’s Polaris Platinum III B-shares. Those annuities carried a 7 percent commission, 90 percent of which went to the advisor, 10 percent to LPL. Over the years, Zullo allegedly also cost clients thousands of dollars in surrender charges through switching between annuities.
In December 2016, Galvin’s office filed suit against Zullo–shortly thereafter, LPL terminated him.
In January 2017, LPL agreed to pay $3.7 million in fines, disgorgement and relief to Zullo’s clients in response to the Massachusetts complaint, which claimed a deficient compliance review process permitted Zullo’s annuities sales to continue without the broker recognizing “warning signs and red flags” of the alleged fraud.
According to Galvin’s office, LPL’s management did not identify discrepancies between clients’ ages and the ages disclosed on annuity sale documents. Instead, the broker recognized Zullo’s sales by placing him in its “Chairman’s Club” for high-level annuity production.