Private Equity’s Free Pass

Jordan A. Thomas, a partner at [prior firm] and a former assistant director in the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, represents the whistleblower.

“For more than a decade,” he said, “many leading private equity firms in the country have collected billions of dollars in illegal fees for engaging in unregistered broker-dealer activities for things like M&A advice and debt offerings. By design, this failure allowed the industry to escape the oversight, limitations and expenses of the required broker-dealer regulatory scheme that all other market participants were subject to.”