Prosecutors accuse hedge fund manager and former lieutenant of scheme that was 'historic in scope'
The men were charged with crimes including racketeering conspiracy and securities fraud in a scheme the U.S. attorney called “historic in scope.”.
“And we allege that they told those lies for a reason: so that the banks would have no idea that Archegos was really up to a big market manipulation scheme.” Authorities said Mr. Becker and Mr. Tomita understood that if they were truthful with the banks about the amount of risk Archegos was taking on, the financial institutions would not keep arranging new derivatives trades for it. When Mr. Hwang could not pay, the banks sold off millions of shares that were backing the swaps and took control of collateral that Archegos had posted in exchange for its big borrowings. The risky result: Archegos held enormous positions in a small number of stocks using billions in borrowed money. Mr. Hwang knew that Archegos could affect markets simply through the exercise of its buying power, the complaint said. The collapse of Archegos shocked Wall Street and led to investigations by federal prosecutors, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators. Archegos used a complex security sold by banks called a total return swap, allowing Mr. Hwang to wager on the movement of stocks without actually buying them. It lost more than $5 billion, and the trading debacle led to a number of top-level management changes at the bank. At one point, Archegos effectively controlled $160 billion in a small basket of stocks that included ViacomCBS and Discovery, prosecutors said. The swap allowed Archegos to quickly take on much larger positions in companies than it normally would be able to if it were buying shares outright. And it spread its bets across several banks using sophisticated financial instruments called swaps, which allowed Mr. Hwang to bet on the direction of stock prices without actually owning the shares. Mr. Hwang was arrested at his home in Tenafly, N.J.
Archegos Capital Management's owner, Bill Hwang, and its former chief financial officer, Patrick Halligan, were arrested Wednesday.
As a result, investors were unaware that Archegos was dominating the trading of a few select companies. At the time, he was running an Asia-focused hedge fund, Tiger Asia Management. Last May, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood disclosed that Hwang had provided the seed funding for her first four ETFs. After Archegos couldn't meet its margin calls, the firms' counterparties suffered significant losses. In a 59-page indictment, federal prosecutors allege Hwang used his personal fortune to manipulate markets and commit fraud in a scheme that had far-reaching consequences. It also shed light on potential risks at family offices, which are private funds that operate under less regulatory oversight than hedge funds. - Archegos Capital Management's owner, Bill Hwang, and its former chief financial officer, Patrick Halligan, were arrested Wednesday in connection with the implosion of the family office last year.
Bill Hwang, the enigmatic investor behind one of the most spectacular trading debacles in Wall Street history, was arrested Wednesday morning over what ...
Federal prosecutors allege the scheme swelled the firm's portfolio from $1.5 billon to $35 billion in a single year.
“The house of cards could only be sustained if that cycle of deceptive trading, lies and buying power continued uninterrupted,” Grewal said in a statement. In 2012, the regulator accused him and his former fund, Tiger Asia, with insider trading and market manipulation. (The lack of prosecutions contributes to the wide range.) But some of those wagers went the wrong way, prompting Archegos’s lenders to ask to be repaid. Swap holders stand to gain or lose based on the price of the underlying assets. The case marks one of the highest-profile criminal white-collar prosecutions in years.
The billionaire head of Archegos Capital Management, a former protégé of hedge-fund titan Julian Robertson, faces fraud and racketeering charges.
- Opinion: How Elon Musk Can Liberate Twitter You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. More than $100 billion in stock market value vanished in a matter of days.
Archegos Capital Management was a family office run by Bill Hwang, a former Tiger Cub hedge fund manager, that invested his personal fortune. Starting in about ...
Archegos used these profits, leveraged with more money borrowed from its banks, to buy more of its favorite stocks. Starting in about 2020, Archegos’s investment strategy consisted of buying a whole ton of shares of like 10 stocks, using mostly money borrowed from about a dozen banks. As the prices went up, Archegos had mark-to-market profits: The shares it bought earlier at lower prices were worth more, so it had made money.
Banks lost more than US$10 billion (S$13.8 billion) in Hwang's vast, criminal scheme to manipulate markets, prosecutors say.
The indictment said Archegos' positions were inflated with the use of borrowed money and derivative securities that required no public reporting. Hwang was charged with fraud, and Patrick Halligan, the chief financial officer of Archegos, was also arrested and charged with fraud. Prosecutors also allege that Hwang coordinated certain trades with a close friend and former colleague at an unnamed hedge fund to maximise his market impact. Others, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank, escaped relatively unscathed. Both men agreed to restrict their travel. Hwang's spectacular gains and losses extended to well-known stocks such as entertainment giant ViacomCBS.
Hwang and Halligan were charged with 11 criminal counts, including racketeering conspiracy, market manipulation and wire fraud.
If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.
Archegos founder Bill Hwang plead guilty to a series of charges by U.S. authorities, including fraud and racketeering, after being arrested Wednesday ...
The prices dropped. The bubble burst. Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also brought forward civil complaints on the same day, saying that Hwang and Archegos had «engaged in a brazen scheme to manipulate the market» and «propped up a $36 billion house of cards» through manipulative trading and dishonesty to obtain bank loans. «Eventually, the weight of Defendants' fraudulent and manipulative scheme was too much for Archegos to bear, and over the course of less than a week in late March 2021, the house of cards collapsed,» the SEC said. Hwang and Halligan both pleaded not guilty to all charges and were released on $100 million and $1 million bond, respectively. Archegos founder Bill Hwang pleaded not guilty to a series of charges by U.S. authorities, including fraud and racketeering, after being arrested on Wednesday morning.
The meltdown of Bill Hwang's New York private investment firm left global banks with $10 billion in losses.
Prosecutors also brought charges against Archegos head trader William Tomita and Chief Risk Officer Scott Becker for their alleged roles in the scheme. Hwang and Halligan make their next court appearance on May 19. Hwang was also able to exploit another regulatory loophole by trading through his family office, a type of private fund that does not have to register with the SEC, prosecutors said. Lawrence Lustberg, a lawyer for Hwang, said in a statement that the case had "absolutely no factual or legal basis." Halligan pleaded not guilty to three charges. Prosecutors on Wednesday alleged that Hwang amassed his huge equity exposures by lying to the banks in order to increase Archegos' credit lines.
The now-notorious owner of Archegos Capital Management took extraordinary risks by leveraging stock positions and artificially inflating their prices, ...
The $2 billion in trading consumed Archegos' cash and it would not be able to meet its margin calls if the offensive failed. And when they did, billions of dollars of capital evaporated nearly overnight." On March 22, 2021 Hwang's house of cards started to teeter. The banks began unwinding the trades, sending the shares tumbling. Wall Street banks were initially wary of Hwang due to his regulatory issues, but eventually Japan's Nomura gave him a second chance. Hwang pleaded guilty to wire fraud related to illegal trading of Chinese stocks and paid $44 million to settle U.S. insider trading charges. Hwang turned Tiger Asia into a family office, renaming it Archegos Capital Management in early 2013. This allowed Archegos to accumulate leverage of as much as 1,000%. "No. It is a sign of me buying," he replied. In these trades, banks promised Archegos a return based on the performance of a handful of stocks. Wearing a green turtleneck and beige slacks, Hwang later pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan court and was released on a $100 million bail bond. His lawyer said he was "entirely innocent."
Are we going to be able to pay for these trades today? I don't see how we can.”
The collapse of Archegos – Bill Hwang's family office that was virtually unknown even on Wall Street – exposed gaping holes in how major banks manage risk.
Archegos Capital Management founder Bill Hwang and chief financial officer Patrick Halligan were charged with fraud, in the latest fallout from the ...
Inside Bill Hwang's Archegos Capital Management, panic was setting in. Hwang had amassed one of the world's great fortunes in virtual secrecy, ...