Uglier and uglier. A class action has been filed against Tim Durham’s Fair Finance in Summit County, Ohio, according to Greg Andrews at the IBJ.
They allege a sort of bait and switch (or is it smash and grab?) with Fair Finance. Basically, this long time company offered a fairly sound investment, selling securities based on customer-finance contracts. Fair had been in business since 1934. Durham and his partner, Jim Cochran, bought the company in 2002 and since then, according to the allegations of the suit, have been diverting funds for their own purposes.
The suit alleges that Durham and co-owner Jim Cochran have used Fair like a personal bank since buying it in 2002, pulling tens of millions of dollars out in the form of related-party loans. Fair, which was founded in 1934 and historically made money by purchasing customer-finance contracts, obscured the fundamental change in its business in the offering circulars, the suit alleges. Fair Finance used “a tangled web of financial transactions to conceal the withdrawal of the funds … for their own enrichment.,” according to the suit.
“Upon buying the company, the two out-of-state owners promoted the same values and business models to deceive investors into investing tens of millions of dollars of their hard-earned life savings in the company even though the new owners had no intention of continuing to operate the business as the Fair family had for so many years.”
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