Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Bernie Madoff, the investment management firm owner who was convicted of operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person.
But you may not have heard of Danny Pang, a smaller-scale, Asian American version of Bernie Madoff as reported in mid-April in the Wall Street Journal who was being investigated and — for a while — couldn’t be found:
“Mr. Pang’s résumé depicts a glittering success story: a Taiwanese immigrant who earned an M.B.A., worked on Wall Street and now heads a $4 billion investment fund … But both Mr. Pang’s past and his business may not be quite as they appear. The university from which he says he has an M.B.A. and another degree says it has no record of either. Morgan Stanley, where Mr. Pang’s bio says he was a senior vice president and senior high-tech merger adviser, says it can find no record it ever employed him… A former president of the firm Mr. Pang heads — Private Equity Management Group Inc. in Irvine, Calif. — says Mr. Pang told him in 2007 that part of the enterprise involved a Ponzi scheme. The executive also alleges that Mr. Pang improperly used some of investors’ cash for the firm’s benefit and once told him to deceive investors with a fake insurance policy. And at a venture-capital firm where Mr. Pang worked earlier, the CEO says he fired Mr. Pang for stealing $3 million from an escrow account in June 1997.”
Since then, Danny Pang has been found and arrested by the FBI, and this past week, was released on a $1 million bond and confined to his Newport Beach home with electronic monitoring. I think that this qualifies Pang as a disgrasian. See, Asian Americans really can be anything; police officer chief’s, Ivy League university presidents or disgraced financiers!
(Image Source: Associated Press)
