ATLANTA – The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Atlanta-based film producer Ryan Felton and rapper and actor T.I., whose actual name is Clifford Harris Jr., in connection with two cryptocurrency-based investment schemes.
The SEC also charged FLiK and CoinSpark, two companies controlled by Felton that conducted what are known as initial coin offerings.
“Initial coin offerings can be used to fund innovative and exciting projects that might not otherwise be able to come to life through traditional funding sources,” said Byung J. “BJay” Pak, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, which pursued a parallel complaint against Felton, 46, of Atlanta, that resulted in his indictment by a federal grand jury last week.
“[Felton] promised investors a stake in innovative ventures and allegedly spent investor funds lavishly on personal expenses,” Pak added.
The SEC complaint alleges that Felton promised to build a digital streaming platform for FLiK and a digital-asset trading platform for CoinSpark.
Instead, he allegedly transferred FLiK tokens to himself and sold them on the market for $2.2 million. He also allegedly engaged in manipulative trading to inflate the price of the SPARK tokens.
“The federal securities laws provide the same protections to investors in digital-asset securities as they do to investors in more traditional forms of securities,” said Carolyn M. Welshhans, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “As alleged in the SEC’s complaint, Felton victimized investors through material misrepresentations, misappropriation of their funds and manipulative trading.”
Felton used the vast majority of the investor proceeds to fund an extravagant lifestyle, including all-cash purchases of a $1.5 million residence and a $180,000 red 2007 Ferrari 599 GTB Fioran Coupe. The government is seeking to forfeit the proceeds of his schemes and previously filed a civil forfeiture action, which is staying pending resolution of the criminal prosecution.
Three others were charged in the case: William Sparks Jr., T.I.’s social media manager; Chance White and Owen Smith, all of Atlanta.
Aside from Felton, all of the other defendants have agreed to settlements resolving the case against them.
Sparks, White and Smith each agreed to pay a penalty of $25,000 and to injunctions prohibiting them from participating in the issuance, purchase, offer or sale of any digital-asset security for five years.
The SEC’s order against T.I. requires him to pay a $75,000 civil penalty and not participate in offerings or sales of digital-asset securities for at least five years.
Georgia Tech is the eighth-best public university in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.
ATLANTA – Georgia is one of only three states with more than one public university in the nation’s Top 20, according to rankings released Monday by U.S. News & World Report.
Georgia Tech is ranked eighth-best among public universities, tied with the University of California at Irvine and the University of California at San Diego.
The magazine ranked the University of Georgia 15th, tied with the University of Illinois.
California had the most schools in the Top 20 with five, while Virginia placed two.
The annual U.S. News & World Report rankings take into account a number of factors. Graduation and retention rates comprise the largest percentage of the ranking criteria, accounting for 30% of an institution’s total score.
Faculty resources, such as class size and the student-to-faculty ratio account for 20% of the score, and peer assessments by university presidents, provosts and deans of admissions also count for 20%.
Georgia is lagging in its count of the 2020 U.S. Census. (U.S. Census Bureau photo)
With a deadline looming, Georgia is pushing to increase its final count in the 2020 U.S. Census amid hurdles posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and poor internet access in some areas.
As of last week, roughly 81% of households in Georgia had completed the 2020 census either on their own initiative or after census takers visited them in a door-to-door canvassing effort that has been complicated by COVID-19 social distancing.
That completion rate ranks Georgia at the bottom tier of U.S. states, trailed only by Alabama. Several other Southern states including Louisiana, Mississippi and both Carolinas have also struggled to up their census counts. The national average completion rate stood at 89.4%.
The deadline for wrapping up the census count is currently set for Sept. 30.
“We are not doing well,” said Michele NeSmith, research and policy development director for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia, who has been working on census outreach for the past several months. “Overall, we still have a lot of work to do.”
The decennial count affects the state’s share of a huge pot of federal dollars provided annually for a wide range of programs like Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps, housing vouchers, highway construction, child-care services, special education and more.
Roughly $1.5 trillion will be available for states to tap into depending on the size of their census-determined populations, according to research from Georgia Washington University. The larger the population, the larger the share.
The census also plays a major political role in influencing how state lawmakers may redraw General Assembly and congressional district boundaries during negotiations next summer.
Some counties have seen gains in their census counts so far compared to 2010, said NeSmith. For instance, Pulaski and Pike counties – both located in central rural parts of the state – have each seen about a 7% increase in their population counts.
Overall, 43 Georgia counties have increased their self-response rates since the previous census.
But many counties are still lagging. NeSmith noted that as of last week, 58 counties showed self-reporting rates of less than 50%. Some counties like Jenkins, Terrell, Dooly and Calhoun have fallen far behind their self-reporting counts by between 15% to more than 25% below the 2010 census, she said.
Georgia has also largely lagged in the success rate for door-to-door census takers to get people to complete the census who did not do so on their own. Overall, the statewide success for those follow-up counts stood at 57.4% as of Friday.
South Georgia areas saw especially low follow-up counts, with a broad stretch of the state from the Macon area down to the Florida line showing between 39% and 46% follow-up success rates, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
The counting shortfall has coincided with social-distancing practices prompted by COVID-19, which quickly handcuffed outreach volunteers who had been planning for months to help people in hard-to-reach areas take the census in local libraries, churches and big events that were shuttered.
Census outreach officials and volunteers who formed statewide and local counting committees have just about exhausted their resources for rolling out awareness efforts via social media, phone calls, texts and mailers, said Holger Loewendorf, a research analyst with the Georgia Municipal Association.
“We’re kind of at an inflection point,” Loewendorf said. “We’ve done almost everything we can in terms of our messaging.”
Outreach has been particularly difficult in hard-to-reach segments of the population that lack good internet access or tend to mistrust government activities in general, Loewendorf said. The pandemic has made reaching those individuals even more difficult, he said.
To overcome challenges, Loewendorf said outreach workers have framed completing the census as a social responsibility akin to voting in the upcoming election. They also tie low counts to fewer local funds, which could mean less money for public-health agencies and schools struggling in the pandemic.
“All these current crises that we’re going through only heighten the importance of the census,” Loewendorf said. “A lot of these issues can be remedied by the census to a certain degree.”
But time is running out. After extending the count deadline to Oct. 31, the U.S. Census Bureau recently shortened that deadline to Sept. 30, cutting a month out of the remaining time that everyone has to complete the census.
Federal lawsuits filed to keep the Oct. 31 deadline await hearings in the coming days, but outreach workers like NeSmith and Loewendorf are not banking on a favorable court outcome.
Meanwhile, several groups are still pushing hard to encourage people to fill out census forms before the Sept. 30 deadline. Among these groups is Fair Count, the census-focused nonprofit founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who also founded a separate voting-rights group.
Fair Count organized outreach bus tours in 75 counties across the state over the summer and has promoted the census via social media, virtual townhalls, phone banking and other outreach methods, said the group’s program director, Ed Reed.
Reed estimated thousands of Georgians were reached by those efforts, resulting in “upticks outside the norm” in the state’s census count. Indeed, Georgia did boost its completion rate from around 56% in late May to roughly 81% in early September due to increased awareness and door-to-door outreach.
Now, Fair Count has launched a census-focused virtual bus tour across Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and South Carolina that began earlier this month. The group is partnering on the virtual tour with the E Pluribus Unum initiative, founded by former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
“We’re trying to be creative and savvy to reach people where they are,” Reed said. “The only way that we’ll be able to fully respond and rebuild and recover from COVID-19, is if we have a fair and accurate census.”
Others, like Loewendorf, also sought to convey that all is not doom-and-gloom with the census. There is still time to tally up more Georgians and hard-to-count persons across the country, he stressed.
“There’s still hope, so to speak,” Loewendorf said. “Now, it’s just can you take five minutes out of your day and complete the census.”
ATLANTA – A Middle Georgia drug dealer arrested following a two-month undercover operation in Butts County has pleaded guilty to one count of distribution of methamphetamine.
Darian Berry, 40, of Jackson pleaded guilty earlier this week in federal court in Macon before U.S. District Judge Tripp Self. He faces up to 20 years in prison, a $1 million fine and three years of supervised release.
“Law enforcement stopped a well-known meth dealer in Butts County,” said Charlie Peeler, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. “The defendant is facing a steep prison sentence without parole for pushing this poison in Middle Georgia.”
Berry admitted to selling methamphetamine to a confidential informant on five separate occasions in Butts County between July and August 2018. Officers with the Butts County Sheriff’s Office conducted and recorded the buys.
“We will continue to pursue those spreading poison in our community until justice is served,” Butts County Sheriff Gary Long said. “This type of result is what happens when agencies work together.”
The Butts County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in conducting the operation. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney William R. Keyes.
ATLANTA – Court proceedings in Georgia will start back toward some semblance of normalcy under an order issued Thursday by Chief Justice Harold Melton.
The order authorizes grand jury proceedings to resume immediately, even though jury trials are still suspended.
Melton’s order extends until Oct. 10 the statewide judicial emergency he first declared back in mid-March, as the state virtually shut down to discourage the spread of coronavirus. Thursday’s was the sixth 30-day extension of that original order.
While jury trials remain on hold, Melton indicated Thursday he intends to order trials to resume when he issues the next 30-day extension next month.
“As explained in the last extension order, this broad prohibition cannot continue, even if the pandemic continues,” the chief justice wrote in Thursday’s order. “The criminal justice system, in particular, must have some capacity to resolve cases by indictment and trial.”
To lay the groundwork for a resumption of jury trials, Thursday’s order calls for the chief judge of each superior court to assemble a local committee for each county in his or her judicial circuit. The committee, made up of judicial system participants, will develop detailed guidelines for safely resuming jury trials, based on guidelines developed by a statewide task force Melton created in May.
Melton cautioned that neither grand jury proceedings nor jury trials are expected to start until a month or longer after they are authorized because of the time it takes to summon potential jurors.
“It should also be recognized that there are substantial backlogs of unindicted cases, and due to ongoing public health precautions, those proceedings will not occur at the scale or with the speed they occurred before the pandemic,” the order states.
Melton praised courts across the state for expanding their use of remote proceedings since March through technology including videoconferencing.
“Those proceedings that can be done remotely should be done remotely,” he said. “But those that cannot – based on law or practicality – must nevertheless resume, but under strict adherence to public safety guidelines.”
