Premium Point Investments co-founder Anilesh “Neil” Ahuja was sentenced to 50 months in prison for conspiring to overvalue the hedge fund’s assets by more than $100 million to attract new investors and prevent withdrawals, in what the U.S. called “one of the largest mismarking schemes ever prosecuted,” Bloomberg News reported Before U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla handed down his sentence yesterday, Ahuja apologized to dozens of friends and family members who had packed the Manhattan courtroom and said that he’d failed as a leader of the firm. Yet in requesting an 18-month term, Ahuja called portfolio manager Amin Majidi, who pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors, the architect of the plot. The judge rejected that argument, saying that Ahuja drove the conspiracy from the top. Prosecutors have been cracking down on mismarking, the use of questionable methods to make assets appear more valuable than they are. The chief executive officer of Live Well Financial Inc. was charged in August with defrauding lenders by artificially inflating the value of bonds used as loan collateral. He has pleaded not guilty. A former analyst at Visium Asset Management LP got more than 18 months in 2017 for helping inflate the value of bond holdings to hide losses.
