Some 1,000 investors this month have been sent an initial payment of $5.44 million or 7 cents on the dollar, stemming from an investigation by Texas securities regulators into a life settlement fraud scheme.
The payment was disclosed by the Texas Securities Board, which filed suit against Retirement Value LLC and Hill Country Funding, both of New Braunfels, Texas, in 2010.
The state alleged in seeking control of the companies that principals as well as "licensees" or agents, had sold interests in 53 life insurance policies with an aggregate face value of approximately $131,000,000 to investors.
"Before being forced to close, Retirement Value and Hill Country raked in about $80 million from investors in less than a year," regulators alleged in court filings.
Regulators said investors were told they could expect to earn 16.5 percent annually.
Eduardo Espinosa, the receiver for the two companies, said "licensees," or agents, were promised commissions of 16 to 18 percent, and Retirement Value claimed an average of 12 percent of the capital raised as its profits.
Espinosa, a shareholder at Cox Smith and Matthews, a law firm in Dallas, told the National Underwriter and has presented documents to the court, state securities regulators and the victims, that he hopes to recover almost $80 million invested in the two related companies over the next decade.
The projected total payments are in contrast to another life settlement scheme involving A&O Resource Management, based in Houston.
That case, involving an estimated $100 million in investments by what federal prosecutors said were more than 800 people in 37 states and Canada, "hundreds of them elderly retirees," resulted in final distributions of eight cents on the dollar, according to a settlement approved in federal bankruptcy court in Chicago.
