The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a complaint against a New York registered investment advisory and its owner, saying the firm reported phony figures for its assets under management, which it has variously claimed to be in the tens of billions and even tens of trillions of dollars.

The commission filed a complaint against Vista Financial and its CEO, Ruben Cedrick Williams in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York, claiming Vista misrepresented its amount of registered assets under management on its ADV forms in April of 2022 and 2023.

The two-year-old firm said in 2022 that its assets were $10 billion, but offered no corroborative evidence for that figure, according to the SEC. By 2023, the number had risen to $11.5 trillion. For the sake of comparison, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, reported total assets under management of just under $9.5 trillion on June 30.

The firm also failed to identify one of its owners, the agency claimed. Furthermore, the agency said Vista has ignored repeated requests to correct the record.

Vista’s current Form ADV says it is based in the Bronx and New York and has $11.49 trillion in assets held for only 32 high-net-worth clients. According to its brochure, it charges asset management fees (1% for smaller accounts, with tiered fees for larger accounts) and hourly fees of $300 per hour.

In the bio of Williams in the brochure he is described as the CEO and “is also a mortgage loan originator and the CEO at Shyvista Mortgage, an affiliate of Vista Financial that originates and services home loans. Mr. Williams will receive separate yet typical compensation in the form of commissions and fees relating to the purchase or sale of mortgage products.”

A person reached by phone identifying himself as Williams said Vista’s legal team would have to answer any questions. The team had not contacted Financial Advisor by press time.

The SEC said that Vista provided a spreadsheet of clients and assets to its examiners in June 2022 after first noting that it only had one client—a foreign trust—and oversaw $180 billion in assets. After that, Vista stopped cooperating and failed to respond to follow-up requests for information, the SEC claimed. The firm did respond to a deficiency letter saying that client assets were being transferred to different custodians and said bank and brokerage statements would be forthcoming, but the SEC said that these documents never arrived. The SEC said Vista and Williams failed to appear for investigative testimony in May of this year.

The SEC claims that the firm never had assets approaching $11.5 trillion, never showed that it had enough in assets to meet the $25 million required to register with the SEC, and that “in fact, Vista has failed to produce documents evidencing any legitimate assets under management.”

“For example,” said the complaint, “the spreadsheet that Vista provided to the [examination] team listed that its client assets included a bank account that purportedly had a balance of over 140 billion euros. Bank records evidence that, in fact, the bank account has never maintained a balance of more than $3,500 since it was opened in April 2021.

“Other assets Vista had listed on the spreadsheet included debt instruments, including approximately $42 billion in U.S. Treasury Bonds from a single issuance. The spreadsheet also listed six medium-term notes issued by [a corporation], which purportedly had market values totaling $3 billion. Based on its review of brokerage and bank records, the commission has found no evidence that Vista managed any Treasury Bonds, let alone bonds valued in the tens of billions of dollars.” The corporation mentioned did not respond to a commission investigative subpoena about information regarding the notes, the SEC said. “Moreover, in October 2022, [the corporation] filed a notice of exempt offering of securities on Form D with the commission that represented it had no revenue.”

The complaint said Williams is 30 and a resident of Tennessee and serves as both co-owner of Vista and its CEO and CCO. “Williams obtained his Series 65 license in September 2021 and is an investment adviser representative with Vista. He has no prior work experience in the securities industry,” said the complaint.

The SEC also said in its complain that the 2022 Form ADV did not identify one of Vista’s owners and misstated how the ownership interest was divided.