SEC Joins Hunt for $10 Million Missing From Investment Firm

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating First Pension Corp., a bankrupt pension fund investment firm, looking for as much as $10 million known to be missing, the company’s trustee said Thursday.

Banking regulators reportedly have found at least $350,000 of the missing money in a Singapore bank, officials involved in the investigation said.

“It’s pretty solid that the money was transferred there,” said James Joseph, the Los Angeles lawyer appointed as First Pension’s bankruptcy trustee.

Citing SEC policy, agency spokeswoman Lori Richards would neither confirm nor deny that her office is investigating Irvine-based First Pension, but Joseph said he met with four SEC lawyers at company offices Thursday morning.

First Pension invested about $350 million for about 8,000 private individuals, many of them from Southern California. The money was placed mainly in second-trust deeds. First Pension filed for liquidation last Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana. It remains unclear what has happened to the investors’ money.

The bankruptcy filing came a day after the custodian for investors’ money, Summit Trust Co. of Englewood, Colo., was seized by state regulators--after the institution’s president told them that about $10 million had been transferred without his authorization.

First Pension and Summit are controlled by Villa Park businessman William E. Cooper. Cooper’s lawyer, Milan Smith in Torrance, could not be reached for comment.

The SEC is the second federal agency to become involved. FBI officials earlier this week said they were investigating First Pension, but they would not elaborate.

In Irvine, meanwhile, dozens of worried investors gathered outside First Pension’s locked office Thursday morning.

Richard Bradshaw, a 64-year-old graphics designer, said he is owed $6,000 in dividend payments. He said he and others banged on the office doors until a woman emerged. She told them that neither Cooper nor any other executive was available to answer their questions, he said.

“She said she didn’t know where any of the records were,” said Bradshaw, who is also a limited partner in First Diversified Financial Services, the holding company for First Pension. “I have a right to those records,” he said.

He said Joseph and the SEC investigators were in the closed office more than an hour, then left without speaking to the waiting investors.