A former UBS rep has been sentenced to more than six years in prison for stealing nearly $6 million dollars from a wealthy family and spending the money on his extramarital affairs.
Judge Donald L. Graham of U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday sentenced German Nino, a 56-year-old ex-UBS financial advisor, to 78 months in federal prison.
In April, Nino, of Weston, Fla., pleaded guilty to stealing money from the family, which had multiple accounts with the bank, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
Nino, who worked in UBS Financial Service’s Miami branch office, made 62 unauthorized transfers from accounts belonging to three related clients between 2014 to 2020, the Department of Justice said in a statement.
Nino used most of the money to subsidize his extramarital affairs, according to court and regulatory documents.
“Nino spent approximately $4.6 million of the stolen money on several women with whom he had romantic relationships,” the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a civil complaint it filed against Nino in January. “His purchases ranged from small gifts and vacations, to luxury cars, private school tuition, and an apartment in Colombia.”
The former investment advisor representative, who worked for UBS for eight years until he resigned in 2020, swindled the family out of $6 million by creating fake statements and forging their signatures to authorize transfers.
Nino even went so far as to remove an email address from one of the client’s UBS profiles so they wouldn’t be notified about the unauthorized transfers, the DOJ said in a statement.
Nino agreed to forfeit his interest in a home near Naples, Fla, with restitution totaling over $7 million, prosecutors said.
The victimized couple had $11 million invested with UBS through Nino. When he began making the transfers out of the accounts in 2014, he sometimes sold the clients’ securities at the same time and put the funds in a bank account that he kept separate from his marital accounts, according to court documents.