As his member firm’s president, CEO and registered principal, Paris had overall supervisory responsibilities for the firm, including reviewing and performing due diligence for private placements and for reviewing and approving new products, including the assignment of a new product to a business unit.
Paris signed a sales agreement for a private placement offering and failed to perform due diligence beyond reviewing the private placement memorandum (PPM), and while he had received third-party due diligence reports regarding earlier private placements, he did not seek or obtain a report for the latest offering and did not conduct any continuing due diligence or follow-up because of the limited time between offerings, the similarity of the deals and representations from the issuer that no additional due diligence was necessary. Unlike earlier offerings, there were serious red flags that Paris could not identify without adequate due diligence.
In his firm’s sale of several offerings by another issuer, Paris failed to perform due diligence even though his firm received a specific fee related to due diligence purportedly performed in connection with each offering. Paris did not travel to the issuer’s headquarters to conduct due diligence and did not seek or request any financial information other than what was contained in the PPM. Once he had concluded that his firm could sell the offerings, Paris did not conduct any continuing due diligence or follow-up, and due to limited time between the offerings, the similarity of the deals and representations from the issuer that no material changes had occurred, he concluded that no additional due diligence was necessary. In addition, Paris did not believe it necessary to pay for due diligence reports for the new offerings because they would say the same thing as previous reports but they did identify numerous red flags. Moreover, Paris should have scrutinized each of the offerings given the high rates of return to ensure they were legitimate and not payable from proceeds of later offerings, as in a Ponzi scheme.
Acting on his firm’s behalf, Paris failed to maintain a supervisory system reasonably designed to achieve compliance with applicable securities laws and regulations with respect to the offerings.