The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a Fenton, Mich., investment advisor with defrauding an elderly client of $314,000 and using the funds to pay for personal items such as his mortgage, real estate taxes and boat and car loans.

The agency’s suit, brought in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division, said that advisor Steven F. Muntin had worked with both an SEC registered firm in Flint and through his own unregistered firm until February 2020. In the four years prior to that, he allegedly solicited an elderly widow to write checks to the firm he controlled, known as Executive Asset Management, outside the relationship with the SEC-registered advisor, identified on BrokerCheck as Taylor & Morgan Asset Management.

Muntin, age 57, had been the sole owner of Executive Asset Management since starting his career in 1992, the SEC said. After he joined Taylor & Morgan in 2015, he moved the bulk of his client assets there, receiving 85% to 96% of the asset management fees his clients paid to his new firm. From 2015 to 2020 he served about 50 clients, mostly in Eastern Michigan, in his years with Taylor & Morgan. However, he continued to advise clients on insurance and securities products through his own outside firm without telling his new firm. (Executive Asset Management had previously been registered with the SEC and the state of Michigan until the registration lapsed in 2014. The SEC said the firm had $26 million in assets).

In March 2016, the agency said, Muntin began asking his elderly client to write checks to Executive Asset Management. These checks ran up to $305,750 until February 2020.

“Muntin told [the client] that he would invest the money in stocks, bonds, or other securities that would generate a return for [her] grandchildren,” said the SEC complaint. “However, Muntin did not invest any of [the] money in securities. Instead, Muntin used [her] money to pay his personal expenses such as making payments for his personal real estate taxes, health insurance, boat loan, car loan, and credit card bills.”

He also overcharged her for asset management fees over these years by $9,000, the SEC said. The agency said that Muntin “employed devices, schemes and artifices to defraud” and “obtained money and property by means of untrue statements of material fact.”

According to the BrokerCheck website, Muntin was involved in customer disputes over unsuitable investments in 2007, with the damages requested rising up to more than a million and a half dollars. But his more recent disclosures are for tax liens.

The SEC is seeking a permanent injunction against Muntin and disgorgement of alleged ill-gotten gains.