(Photo: AP)
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday charged a Tallahassee-based investment advisor firm and its two former principals with defrauding retired NFL players who had joined a class-action lawsuit against the league claiming they suffered brain injuries as a result of concussions.
The SEC charged Cambridge Capital Group Advisors; Cambridge's president Phillip Timothy Howard, a Florida attorney who represented the retired players in the class-action lawsuit; and Don Warner Reinhard, a former registered investment advisor previously barred by the SEC, with defrauding 20 investors in two proprietary hedge funds operating out of Howard's law offices.
According to the complaint, from 2015 through 2017, the defendants raised approximately $4.1 million from about 20 investors — the majority of whom were retired NFL players — through the offer and sale of securities in the form of limited partnership interests in two private investment funds for which Cambridge was the general partner and investment manager – namely, Cambridge Capital Partners LP and Cambridge Capital Group Equity Option Opportunities LP.
Howard represented National Football League players who suffered concussion-related brain injuries during their NFL careers in connection with a class-action lawsuit against the NFL, the complaint states.
Howard, the complaint states, "has acknowledged that these players' 'brain function is not there, their body has been beat up from the NFL, they don't have employment capacity, they don't have credit, and they don't have capital anymore.'"
Nonetheless, Howard and Reinhard solicited the players to invest in the funds. More than half of the players "used their retirement accounts in order to make the investments happen," the complaint states, with Howard and Reinhard allegedly raising $4 million from them.
