We cast no judgement upon either Mr TA Wier or his brother Michael.
All we say is racing integrity depends upon knowing who exactly it is who are buying our yearlings.
Thaddeus?
Please.
Michael and Thaddeus Wier Jr. were spared prison terms Friday but each was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and perform 1,000 hours of community service work for felony investment fraud.
The brothers were sentenced shortly after they came up with the $800,000 restitution for their victims that the state demanded last year.
State Supreme Court Justice Barbara Howe also ordered the two East Aurora men to split the cost of repaying the state’s expenses in prosecuting them.
The Wiers, still denying civil wrongdoing, agreed to a civil consent order with the attorney general’s office, which will permanently bar them from working in the securities industry.
Several investors are suing the Wiers for millions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages over what the state called their penny-stock scam. Justice Howe urged the state attorney general’s office to keep in mind any more money the state demands would be lost to investors.
Court officials noted that the state prosecutors three years ago misspelled the defendants’ last name as Weir on all court documents and recently had to amend with the correct spelling.
During the sentencing, both brothers stressed that they were not involved in widespread investment fraud.
A 29-year-old Buffalo man who lost an inheritance through Wier firms, however, urged the brothers be imprisoned.
Dennis Rosen, chief of the attorney general’s Buffalo consumer frauds unit, told the judge that investor-recovery remains the state’s chief target in the case and he will keep that in mind in tallying the state’s cost of the prosecution.
Under oath, both brothers told the judge their former Buffalo-area securities firms handled about $14 million in investments earlier this decade but none of that money is left. Some money had been previously returned to disgruntled investors, the brothers said.
Rosen told the judge the state believes the Wier clients were criminally swindled out of $6 million to $7 million, which led to their indictments in September 1996 for using criminally deceptive tactics to dupe investors into purchasing high-risk companies they created and controlled.
Speaking on behalf of himself and his brother, Thaddeaus Wier told the judge they are sorry investors lost money but he denied being the “mastermind” of a scheme to steal investor funds.
Wier said he was willing to personally accept “some responsibility” for wrongdoing by brokers working at the Wiers’ Domestic Capital Inc. and TAW Securities firms.
But he also lessened his involvement.
“I am, in fact, not guilty” of all 43 criminal charges lodged against both three years ago, he said.
Under a plea deal, the brothers pleaded guilty to two counts of securities fraud by materially misrepresenting investment risks — a crime under the Blue Skies sections of the State General Business law.
The judge in February 1998 dismissed 41 other fraud counts against both.
Conceding he is now publicly “scarred forever,” Thaddeus Wier Friday said he was “not to blame” for criminal wrongdoing by brokers who worked under him and stressed that he was not aware of “blatant lies” being told investors about high-risk investment deals by the brokers.
Stressing he does not have any money “hidden away” in off-shore accounts, Wier told the judge he deeply regrets the wrongdoing of brokers working under him and insisted investor anger is “misdirected” at him and his brother.
“I asked the brokers to play by the rules and they did not,” Wier told the judge.
Rosen told the judge he expects hundreds of investors damaged by the Wier firms to begin getting payments of about 15 cents on the dollar of their actual loses.
