About a month after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) managed to secure an entry of default against Mark A. Ramkishun, operator of a purported commodity pool called Leo Growl LLC, the regulator has filed a motion for default judgment against the defendant.
The document, submitted on March 22, 2023 in the New York Eastern District Court and seen by FX News Group, includes the CFTC proposals for penalties to be imposed on Ramkishun.
According to the CFTC, the defendant should be ordered to pay $1,076,758 in restitution, plus prejudgment interest, which reflects the total losses incurred by Defendant’s defrauded Pool Participants.
The Commission also requests the Court to order the defendant to pay a civil monetary penalty of $1,566,977.07, plus post-judgment interest.
The CFTC complaint alleges that beginning in at least March 2019 and continuing through at least September 2021, Ramkishun, acted as an unregistered commodity pool operator to fraudulently solicit and receive funds from more than 30 pool participants for the purpose of trading, among other things, commodity futures and options contracts in the pool.
The complaint further alleges that both in the course of soliciting as well as after receiving pool participant funds, Ramkishun knowingly made fraudulent and material misrepresentations and/or omitted material facts about the use of pool participant funds and the profits purportedly earned from Ramkishun’s trading.
Furthermore, rather than use all of the pool participant funds to trade in the pool as he had promised, Ramkishun traded less than half of these funds (resulting in net trading losses) and ultimately misappropriated a substantial portion of pool participant funds on personal expenditures and to make Ponzi-type payments to pool participants.
The complaint also alleges that Ramkishun failed to operate the pool as a separate entity from himself and commingled his personal funds with pool participant funds in violation of CFTC regulations.
The CFTC seeks full restitution to defrauded fund participants, disgorgement of any ill-gotten gains, civil monetary penalties, permanent trading and registration bans, and a permanent injunction against further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations.
