An Irvine financial advisor and lawyer who stole millions of dollars from his professional athlete clients in order to make investments to a company he served on as a board member was sentenced Friday to prison.
Ash Narayan, 55, was ordered to serve 37 months in federal prison and to pay more than $18 million in restitution after pleading guilty last year to federal charges of wire fraud and subscribing to a false tax return, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Narayan, a former investment advisor at RGT Capital Management in Orange County, previously was ordered to repay $1.4 million and a $350,000 civil penalty in connection with a related civil case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He has also been disbarred.
During his tenure at RGT, Narayan represented “high-net-worth individuals who were current and former professional athletes,” according to federal prosecutors.
The SEC previously indicated that several athletes, including former San Francisco Giants pitcher Jake Peavy, former Mission Viejo High, USC and New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez and retired Houston Astros pitcher Roy Oswalt, were among those cheated by Narayan in what the federal agency’s investigators described as a “Ponzi-like scheme.”
Prosecutors allege Narayan advised his clients to invest in The Ticket Reserve, an Illinois company that sold customers an option to buy a ticket to future sporting events, allowing them to “cash in” on playoff games if a team made it to the postseason.
But prosecutors say Narayan failed to tell his clients that he was on Ticket Reserve’s board of directors, or that the company was never profitable and saddled with millions of dollars in debt.
Prosecutors also allege that Narayan under-reported his total income in 2012, claiming he made around $543,000 when he actually earned more than $1.1 million.
The Ticket Reserve ended up in receivership in 2016, prosecutors said, the same year Narayan left RGT.
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