The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged the former head of the Miami office at broker-dealer Direct Access Partners (DAP) for his role in a massive kickback scheme to secure the bond trading business of a state-owned Venezuelan bank.

As Compliance Week previously reported, the SEC and Department of Justice unsealed criminal charges last month brought against two employees of U.S. broker-dealer Direct Access Partners (DAP) and a senior executive of Venezuelan state-owned bank Bandes, arising from a massive bribery scheme.

The indictment accused Tomas Clarke and Jose Alejandro Hurtado of paying at least $3.6 million in bribes to Maria de los Angeles Gonzalez de Hernandez, vice president of finance for Bandes, in exchange for directing trading business to DAP from April 2009 through June 2010. According to the allegations, Hurtado and Clarke received millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, and finder's fees, while Gonzalez received monthly kickbacks that were frequently in six-figure amounts.

In its amended complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan, the SEC has also brought charges against Ernesto Lujan, a managing partner of DAP's global markets group. According to the SEC, Lujan was an “integral participant in the wide-ranging fraudulent scheme.”

“For a scheme this bold to succeed, it required the sneaky collaboration of several individuals, including the head of the Miami office,” Andrew Calamari, Director of the SEC's New York Regional Office, said in a statement. “Lujan and the others may have believed they were covering their tracks, but the SEC's exam and enforcement teams unraveled their fraud.”

In the ongoing investigation, the SEC charged Lujan and the other defendants with fraud and seeks final judgments that would require them to return ill-gotten gains with interest and pay financial penalties. In a parallel action, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York brought criminal charges against Lujan.