What is the status of the SEC case against Guy Gentile?
A direct, sourced answer.
There is no settlement. After a ten-day trial in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida (Case No. 1:21-cv-21079), a Miami jury returned a verdict on July 2, 2024 on a narrow registration and inducement theory under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 — not a fraud theory. The resulting monetary judgment is on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The appeal raises whether control-person status can support disgorgement of corporate revenue without personal receipt, in light of Liu v. SEC and the Supreme Court's reasoning in Sripetch.
The jury did not find fraud and did not find investor harm. The case turned on whether SureTrader, a Bahamas-licensed broker-dealer, also required parallel U.S. registration. The disgorgement question on appeal is whether being a "control person" is the same as personally receiving the money — under Liu and Sripetch, it is not.