Posted on 05/17/2024 3:31:02 PM PDT by Libloather
A billionaire Wall Street financier who notoriously lost tens of billions in a matter of days has returned to court for his blockbuster fraud trial.
Sung Kook 'Bill' Hwang, 60, the founder of Archegos Capital Management, is alleged to have triggered over $100 billion in shareholder losses when his family office fund failed to meet margin calls in March 2021.
He was arrested in April 2022 and charged with fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, as prosecutors claim he carried out a scheme to defraud investors by lying about his firm's portfolio, which at one point stood at over $100 billion.
If convicted, he faces a maximum of 380 years behind bars, in what would amount to one of the largest frauds in US history.
At the start of his trial this week, the court heard from a bank manager who testified about Archegos' attempts to offload hundreds of millions of dollars in a fire sale as Hwang's house of cards began to fall.
The son of a Christian pastor, Hwang was born in Korea before emigrating to the US in 1982. His early career was at Tiger Management, and after he founded a spinoff fund, Tiger Asia Management, the company was charged with insider trading.
Tiger Asia pleaded guilty to criminal wire fraud and agreed to pay $60 million, but Hwang settled without admitting guilt.
Hwang set up his family office in 2013 to manage hundreds of millions of dollars that he made at his former hedge funds, and reportedly caught the eye of regulators after he rapidly built his wealth to over $30 billion.
He was also known to fly under the radar and lived modestly in New Jersey with his wife, while running bible reading sessions with the local community and eschewing his billionaire status.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
“Sung Kook ‘Bill’ Hwang“
And then the jokes just write themselves from there.
Alongside his allegedly fraudulent funds, Hwang also ran the Grace and Mercy Foundation for his philanthropic efforts to ‘support the poor and oppressed’, and at the end of 2022 Bloomberg reported it had $528 million in assets.
Because Archegos was a family office instead of a full-fledged hedge fund, it was not subjected to the same levels of regulation and scrutiny as a hedge fund, which prosecutors said allowed Hwang to use return swaps.
Did he invest in a solar panel company that was heavily subsidized by the government?
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-70
The SEC’s complaint alleges that, from at least March 2020 to March 2021, Hwang purchased on margin billions of dollars of total return swaps. These security-based swaps allow investors to take on huge positions in equity securities of companies by posting limited funds up front. As alleged, Hwang frequently entered into certain of these swaps without any economic purpose other than to artificially and dramatically drive up the prices of the various companies’ securities, which induced other investors to purchase those securities at inflated prices.
He should have worked for the pentagon, they lose billions every year and don’t have to answer for it.
>>Hwang purchased on margin billions of dollars of total return swaps.
for those unfamiliar with esoteric finance...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp
If I lost $36 billion, I’d go back to all the places I had been and look again.
I’m sure most of it is in the couch cushions somewhere.
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