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The founder and two former members of New York investment firm Premium Point Investments LP on Friday pleaded not guilty to charges that they inflated the value of assets held by the firm’s hedge funds by more than $200 million, Reuters reported. Premium Point founder Anilesh Ahuja, former partner Amin Majidi and former trader Jeremy Shor pleaded not guilty to charges of securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy before U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in Manhattan federal court. Premium Point, which specialized in mortgage-related investments through hedge and private-equity funds, managed assets valued at more than $5 billion at its peak, according to prosecutors. It filed for bankruptcy in March.

Activist investor Carl Icahn announced two more nominees for SandRidge Energy Inc.’s board of directors, signaling he’s not interested in a proposed settlement of his fight to take control of the oil and gas explorer, Bloomberg News reported. In a regulatory filing on Friday, Icahn increased his slate of candidates to seven and said it was in SandRidge’s “best interests" for shareholders to elect all of them to replace the current directors at the Oklahoma City company. That followed SandRidge’s announcement earlier last week that it was expanding the five-member board in an attempt to make room for two Icahn representatives. Icahn last month nominated five replacements for the board, after months of criticizing management and helping to scuttle its proposed acquisition of Bonanza Creek Energy Inc. SandRidge has seen its market value plunge from $11 billion before a 2016 bankruptcy to about $500 million today. It has said that it is conducting a review of its options, including a potential sale to Icahn or another party.

Florida’s Office of Financial Regulation has filed an administrative complaint against several South Floridians and accused them of selling unregistered securities to investors in the failed Woodbridge Group of Companies, the Broward County Sun Sentinel reported. According to the state’s complaint filed on Monday, Woodbridge and its agents allegedly sold investors two types of unregistered securities: “promissory notes totaling at least $800 million (sold in approximately 8,000 transactions) and private placement ‘units’ totaling at least $200 million.” Both Woodbridge and its sales agents marketed the investment program by calling the opportunity a “First Position Commercial Mortgage,” the complaint says. Woodbridge called the mortgages “private third party” loans. The state agency alleges that the Florida sales agents committed more than 3,300 state securities violations against more than 800 Florida investors who sank $100 million into Woodbridge.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday launched a searchable database of individuals who have been targeted by the federal watchdog for allegedly breaking trading laws, The Hill reported. The database, called the SEC Action Lookup for Individuals (SALI), allows investors to check whether the person offering them an investment has been penalized for violating securities laws. The tool is intended to help investors avoid bad actors likely to defraud them, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said in a statement. "One of the SEC’s most important tasks is to arm our investors with the tools necessary to identify potential fraudsters. An important risk factor is whether the person you are dealing with has a disciplinary history with the SEC or other regulators,” Clayton said. The SEC said that the database will include individuals “who have settled, defaulted, or contested an enforcement action brought by the SEC, provided that a final judgment or order was entered against them in a federal court or an administrative proceeding.”

Blackstone Group LP’s GSO Capital Partners said that it could support “appropriate changes” to credit-default-swap contracts in response to U.S. regulators’ apparent concerns around a derivatives trade on Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Hovnanian skipped an interest payment due Tuesday on bonds it repurchased and parked with an affiliate, opening the door for GSO to collect payouts on credit-default swaps that insure against nonpayment. The missed payment moves GSO’s complex trade, hatched on the sidelines of a Miami finance conference in February 2017, to the actual from the theoretical just as U.S. financial regulators began to weigh in. It will be up to an International Swaps and Derivatives Association committee whether the default triggers credit-default-swaps contracts tied to Hovnanian debt. The nonpayment was required of the home-building company under a sweetheart-lending deal with GSO featuring off-market debt designed to maximize the payday.

A number of distressed-debt hedge funds are abandoning traditional loan-to-own strategies after years of low interest rates resulted in meager returns for investors, and some are even investing in equities, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Distressed-debt investing, long the purview of legendary investors like David Tepper of Appaloosa Management and Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital Management, has been a tough way to make money in recent years. A decade of low interest rates have made it much easier for troubled companies to find money and refinance debt. BlueMountain Capital Management LLC and Arrowgrass Capital Partners LLP are some of the bigger funds that have shifted away from this niche-investing strategy.