Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Pastor accused of Ponzi scheme


From South Carolina-

The Rev. Ronald Satterfield preached from the pulpit, but authorities say he also ran a multimillion-dollar financial scam out of his historic church in downtown Charleston for several years.

A federal judge has frozen what few assets remain from the $3.3 million that investigators say Satterfield, rector at St. John's Reformed Episcopal Church on Anson Street, put toward a foreign currency Ponzi scheme using money from 70 investors, according to documents filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Charleston.

Satterfield acknowledged the complaints against him, but he insisted

Monday that the allegations made by the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission mischaracterized his trading activities.

"It's not the way they described it," he told The Post and Courier.

Satterfield told investors he could grow a traded pool of money by up to 48 percent during one year, according to court documents. Instead, he lost virtually all of the $1.9 million he invested on their behalf in the trading of foreign currencies, the trading commission said. He used the rest of the money to pay returns to customers until his companies failed in early 2009.

More here-

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/nov/16/pastor-accused-of-ponzi-scheme/

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