Premium Point Investments co-founder Anilesh “Neil” Ahuja was sentenced to 50 months in prison for conspiring to overvalue the hedge fund’s assets by more than $100 million to attract new investors and prevent withdrawals, in what the U.S. called “one of the largest mismarking schemes ever prosecuted.”
Before U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla handed down his sentence on Monday, Ahuja apologized to dozens of friends and family members who had packed the Manhattan courtroom and said he’d failed as a leader of the firm.
“I take full responsibility for those failures,” he said.
Yet in requesting an 18-month term, Ahuja called portfolio manager Amin Majidi, who pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors, the architect of the plot.
The judge rejected that argument, saying Ahuja drove the conspiracy from the top.
“I do not believe all of this was going on without his assent,” Failla said.
Prosecutors have been cracking down on mismarking, the use of questionable methods to make assets appear more valuable than they are. The chief executive officer of Live Well Financial Inc. was charged in August with defrauding lenders by artificially inflating the value of bonds used as loan collateral. He has pleaded not guilty. A former analyst at Visium Asset Management LP got more than 18 months in 2017 for helping inflate the value of bond holdings to hide losses.
Ahuja was convicted of conspiracy and fraud by a federal jury following a monthlong trial, along with a former trader at the now-defunct firm, Jeremy Shor, who was sentenced to 40 months last week. Prosecutors said Ahuja and Majidi, the portfolio manager, set inflated monthly targets for returns, then ordered Shor and other traders to manipulate the valuations accordingly.
Prosecutors had asked Failla to impose a “substantial period” of prison time, saying Ahuja was the chief culprit. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Naftalis told the judge on Monday that Ahuja was a “leader of the fraud.”
“He lied to investors for years, and over the course of his fraud his victims lost tens of millions of dollars,” Naftalis said. “This case was about a hedge fund director who led, concealed and directed one of the largest mismarking schemes ever prosecuted.”