Omar Ali Rizvi graduated from law school in San Francisco and earned a Masters of Laws degree in securities and financial regulations at Georgetown University Law School in the nation's capital, but its obvious that the Irvine man never learned to obey the law.
In the last decade, Rizvi has been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and disbarred for lack of character.
Now, he can add another impressive milestone to his resume.
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This week, a federal judge in Orange County ruled that the 45-year-old man owes a $2.6 million penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for operating a scam that relied on lies boosting returns “in excess of 1000%” for investors.
After agreeing with the SEC's view of the case and push for summary judgement, U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna ordered Rizvi to pay the fine within 180 days.
The federal agency claims that Rizvi launched a series of companies–Bellwether Venture Capital Fund I, Inc. of Irvine and Strategy Partners, LLC of Newport Beach–after he lost his lawyer's license and never registered the entities.
Rizvi
issued press releases claiming wild success for investors, but in
reality his Bellwether operations “never realized any gains on its
holdings and never paid any returns to its investors,” according the SEC
complaint.
Selna also permanently barred him from engaging in future investment businesses.
County
records show that Rizvi has lived or operated businesses in Irvine,
Corona del Mar, Fullerton, Huntington Beach, Manhattan Beach, Santa Ana
and San Francisco.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.