UBS Financial Services has taken one of its ex-financial advisors to court, claiming he fraudulently passed the ownership of a valuable house in New Jersey to his wife even though he later said he couldn’t pay an arbitration award for back loans he owed UBS totaling more than $1 million.
The advisor, Daniel Paul Motherway, was ordered to pay an arbitration award by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) in early 2020 and the agency suspended him in June 2020 for failing to pay, adding that he had failed to prove he couldn’t.
UBS terminated Motherway in 2017. Before he was with UBS, he was an advisor with Wells Fargo until 2015. More recently, he was with National Securities Corp. until 2019, according to BrokerCheck.
Finra said that according to his statement of financial condition in the UBS dispute that Motherway had assets exceeding liabilities, though he countered in an SEC filing that he had no assets of his own to make the repayments for UBS promissory note loans because his assets were his wife’s and their money was not commingled.
In 2019, the couple moved to Georgia. UBS says in its new suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia Atlanta Division, that Motherway sold his Montclair, N.J., house just four months before the evidentiary hearing in the Finra arbitration was going to start. The house was sold for $818,000 in the summer of 2019, according to filings in Essex County, N.J. UBS claims that in 2017 Motherway passed the ownership of the house in Montclair for $10 in a quitclaim deed to his wife, Tara Baquero. Baquero, who is named in the suit, purchased property in Marietta, Ga., on July 17, 2019, for $544,955, according to the UBS claim and Cobb County, Ga., records.
“Defendants Daniel Motherway and Tara Baquero violated the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act by fraudulently conveying real property from Motherway to Baquero for little or no consideration,” says the UBS complaint. “Specifically, defendant Motherway transferred to Baquero, and defendant Baquero accepted real property in New Jersey with knowledge and/or notice of Motherway’s outstanding loan obligations to UBS.
“Later, to further defendants’ scheme to conceal assets from UBS, defendant Baquero sold the property she received and accepted from Motherway to a third party and then used the proceeds to purchase real property in [Georgia]. Thereafter, Motherway represented to UBS, to Finra, and to the SEC that he lacked sufficient assets to repay his obligations to creditor UBS.”
Motherway left UBS in 2017 after the broker-dealer reportedly said he made false claims of merchant fraud against UBS affiliates, according to online reports. Motherway made a counterclaim for $12 million damages, citing defamation, breach of contract, invasion of privacy and public disclosure of private facts. The reason for his termination on his Form U5 was indeed expunged and defamation given as a reason, but the $1,012,729 in compensatory damages plus fees and interest he owed to UBS was upheld.
A Superior Court judge in New Jersey entered judgment against Motherway in the amount of $1,158,990 on July 24, 2020, the complaint says.