"Private equity executive accused of faking investments" by Alexandra Stevenson and Matthew Goldstein New York Times March 29, 2016
A former executive with a large private equity firm has been arrested and charged with securities fraud, federal prosecutors said Monday.
Andrew Caspersen, a Harvard Law School graduate and a partner at the Park Hill Group, an advisory firm that until last fall had been a part of the Blackstone Group’s advisory business, has been accused of seeking to defraud a number of institutional investors of $95 million through fake private equity investments.
One investor duped by Caspersen was a charitable foundation affiliated with an unidentified New York hedge fund that sank nearly $25 million in the scheme.
Caspersen is a son of Finn M.W. Caspersen, a Wall Street financier and philanthropist who committed suicide in 2009. He was battling cancer at the time and his name had become embroiled in an overseas tax evasion investigation.
Federal authorities said the scheme began last summer and ended only a few weeks ago. The SEC said in its complaint that Andrew Caspersen made up e-mail accounts and invented employees and even went as far as to create a fake domain name....
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UPDATE:
"Andrew Caspersen admitted to scamming friends, family, and a charitable foundation out of millions of dollars, after his lawyer had said the Wall Street scion was done in by a gambling habit that spiraled out of control. Caspersen’s victims lost $38.5 million, according to prosecutors. They included the foundation of billionaire Louis Bacon. Paul J. Taubman’s PJT Partners Inc. fired Caspersen, 39, after disclosing his fraud to the government. The plea marks a dramatic fall for the son of Finn M.W. Caspersen, the financier and philanthropist who ran Beneficial Corp. then sold it for almost $9 billion. Andrew Caspersen attended Princeton University, and Harvard Law School’s student center is named after his family. He started gambling in law school, losing tens of millions of dollars, his lawyer, Paul Shechtman, said last month."
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