(HedgeCo.Net) The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the founder and former chief executive of a Silicon Valley startup with defrauding investors in Jumio Inc., a private mobile payments company. The former CEO, Daniel Mattes, agreed to pay more than $17 million to settle the charges. <\/p>\n
According to the SEC\u2019s complaint, filed in federal court in California, Mattes grossly overstated Jumio\u2019s 2013 and 2014 revenues and then sold shares he held personally to investors in the private, secondary market. The complaint alleges that Mattes made approximately $14 million by selling his Jumio shares and hid these sales from Jumio\u2019s board. According to the complaint, Mattes also falsely told an investor that he didn\u2019t want to sell any of his shares because there was \u201clots of great stuff coming up,\u201d and that \u201che\u2019d be stupid to sell at this point.\u201d Jumio restated its financial results in 2015, wiping out most of its revenue, and the shares became worthless after it filed for bankruptcy in 2016. <\/p>\n
\u201cMattes enriched himself at investors\u2019 expense by making false claims about Jumio\u2019s financial results,\u201d said Erin Schneider, Associate Regional Director for the SEC\u2019s San Francisco office. \u201cCompany executives must provide investors with accurate information irrespective of whether their companies are publicly or privately traded.\u201d<\/p>\n
The SEC settled a separate proceeding against Jumio\u2019s former CFO Chad Starkey for failing to exercise reasonable care concerning Jumio\u2019s financial statements and signing stock transfer agreements that falsely implied that Jumio\u2019s board of directors had approved Mattes\u2019 sales. Starkey entered into a cooperation agreement to assist the SEC. Starkey, who sold some of his own shares in 2014, will pay approximately $420,000 in disgorgement and prejudgment interest.<\/p>\n
Without admitting or denying the allegations, Mattes, an Austrian citizen who now heads a private Austria-based company, has agreed to be enjoined from future similar violations and barred from being an officer or director of a publicly traded company in the U.S., and will pay more than $16 million in disgorgement and prejudgment interest plus a $640,000 penalty. The settlement is subject to court approval.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(HedgeCo.Net) The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the founder and former chief executive of a Silicon Valley startup with defrauding investors in Jumio Inc., a private mobile payments company. The former CEO, Daniel Mattes, agreed to pay more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,3,16048],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hedgeco-networks-press-releases","category-hedgeco-news","category-hedgecovest-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68698,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68697\/revisions\/68698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}