A California company and its management team have been ordered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to repay $1.1 million to 13 employee benefit plans.
The Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration had sued Zenith Capital, an investment advisory firm in Santa Rosa, Calif., and its three retirement plan fiduciaries, Rick Lane Tasker, Martel Jed Cooper and Michael Gregory Smith for breach of their fiduciary duty.
The court found that the defendants breached their fiduciary duties and engaged in prohibited transactions when they placed 13 employee benefit plans into Global Money Management, a hedge fund that collapsed and went bankrupt.
The complaint alleged that Zenith Capital and the three individual defendants placed the plans in the high-risk hedge fund despite the fact that the plans were not qualified, accredited investors, and failed to conduct prudent due diligence on Global Money Management or its suitability as investment for the plans.
