Investment Advisor Fined For Bilking Fellow Church Members: SEC

NEW ROCHELLE, NY — A Hudson Valley financial advisor, who was charged with defrauding members of the religious group he belongs to of hundreds of thousands of dollars, has been ordered to pay nearly $700,000 in penalties.

In August of 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Evarist C. Amah with engaging in a yearslong scheme to defraud fellow members of the Grail Movement. Amah operated a financial firm known as EAC Capital from New Rochelle.

Amah was ordered to make $11,618 in restitution and pay a $669,687 civil penalty on Tuesday, according to court records.

According to the initial complaint, Amah was, at the time, a member of the Grail Movement. The Grail Movement has its origins in Vomperberg, Austria, where adherents have established a settlement ("the Mountain") that hosts festivals and other religious activities. Amah and a fellow Grail Movement member initiated an investment scheme that purported to both benefit the Mountain and generate returns for investors. The investment would be open to other Grail Movement members.

From April 2016 to July 2019, Amah raised approximately $700,000 from his advisory clients using materially false and misleading statements about his investment performance, telling them that he had generated modest returns on their investments when, in reality, he had already lost virtually all of their money, according to the SEC complaint.

The SEC said that Amah fabricated at least two performance statements to continue his fraudulent scheme and conceal his misconduct. He is also accused of violating the fiduciary duties he owed to his individual clients by favoring another client, a fund, over them, using the individual clients' assets to pay expenses owed by the fund