2 Accused of Penny-Stock Fraud by U.S.
Two Orange County men are among 12 people sued by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission in an action accusing them of running a $1.6-million penny-stock fraud.
The commission accuses Ramon D’Onofrio of Anaheim Hills and his son, Mark, of Huntington Beach of running up the price of Kinesis Inc. stock so they could sell their holdings at inflated prices.
The Kirkland, Wash., company makes athletic shoes. The SEC says in its lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, that the D’Onofrios drove up the price of the stock from $5 to $22 a share through a series of sham transactions aided by a D’Onofrio associate who was president of Kinesis.
The participants received $1.6 million in “ill-gotten gains” through the sale of 100,000 shares, the SEC contends, some of which were sold to Europeans through a telephone “boiler room” in Marbella, Spain.
Ramon D’Onofrio, the SEC said, has been convicted four times of securities fraud and once of contempt of a civil injunction such as the one the SEC now seeks against him. He also has been enjoined five times by the SEC for violations of securities law.
