ATLANTA – A Georgia man has been sentenced to five years in prison followed by three years of supervised release for running a Ponzi scheme that ensnared more than 100 victims.
Syed Arham Arbab, 23, of Atlanta also was ordered to pay $509,032 in restitution to his victims.
As part of a guilty plea entered in federal court last October, Arbab admitted that while enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens, he solicited investors – many of whom were college students – to invest in two entities he described as hedge funds.
He admitted making misrepresentations to convince the victims to invest about $1 million in Artis Proficio Capital Management and Artis Proficio Capital Investments, promising rates of return as high as 56%. He did not have the liquid capital to make good on these guarantees but did not disclose that to his investors.
Arbab also admitted telling prospective investors a famous pro football player who had played for UGA was an investor and that he was enrolled in a master’s degree program at the university’s Terry College of Business when he had been rejected by Terry College and was running the Ponzi scheme primarily from his fraternity house as an undergraduate.
Arbab spent his investors’ money on personal items, including clothing, fine dining, alcoholic beverages, adult entertainment and interstate travel, including thousands of dollars spent on gambling during three trips to Las Vegas. Arbab was sentenced by U.S. District Judge C. Ashley Royal of the Middle District of Georgia followed an FBI investigation.
ATLANTA – Georgia has joined a 48-state legal settlement requiring C.R. Bard Inc. and its parent company to pay $60 million for the deceptive marketing of transvaginal surgical mesh devices.
Thousands of women implanted with surgical mesh have made claims that they suffered serious complications resulting from the devices, including erosion of mesh through organs, pain during intercourse, and voiding dysfunction.
“Failing to adequately inform patients and health-care providers of the serious risks associated with these devices put the welfare of countless women in jeopardy,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said. “This settlement sends a strong message that these practices are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
The lawsuit filed by the state alleged that C.R. Bard and parent company Becton, Dickinson and Company misrepresented or failed to adequately disclose serious and life-altering risks of surgical mesh devices, including chronic pain, scarring and shrinking of bodily tissue, recurring infections and other complications.
Although C.R. Bard has stopped selling transvaginal mesh, the settlement requires the company to adhere to certain terms if they reenter the transvaginal mesh market.
The company must provide patients with understandable descriptions of complications in marketing materials; train independent contractors, agents, and employees who sell, market, or promote mesh regarding their obligations to report all patient complaints and adverse events to the company; and make sure its practices regarding the reporting of patient complaints are consistent with federal requirements.
ATLANTA – Deteriorating public support for law enforcement is driving police officers away from the profession and making it harder to attract new recruits, representatives of state and local police agencies said Thursday.
While cops expect criminals to see them in a negative light, bad feelings about the police are spreading to ordinary citizens and even elected officials, Butch Ayers, executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police, told the state Senate Study Committee on Law Enforcement Reform at its kickoff meeting.
“Officers are asking themselves, ‘Why am I staying here?’ ”
Ayers said. “We cannot attract people to this noble profession if we continue to vilify the profession.”
Police officers in cities across America have been targets of violent elements of otherwise peaceful protests since the death of George Floyd last May, a Black man who died after a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeled on his neck.
In the most recent incident, two Louisville, Ky., police officers were shot and wounded Wednesday night hours after a grand jury indicted a former city police detective for wanton endangerment for allegedly shooting into the home of a neighbor of Breonna Taylor but did not charge any officers in the fatal shooting of Taylor.
“We have bad actors, but we do not systematically do wrong,” Terry Norris, executive director of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, told committee members. “We’re not the enemy.”
The Senate formed the study committee in June to consider whether state laws governing policing need to be changed. Practices the panel plans to review include use-of-force policies, police chokeholds, no-knock warrants and the use of “certain chemicals or projectiles” for crowd control, according to the resolution creating the committee.
Much of Thursday’s discussion focused on police officer training.
Chris Wigginton, director of the Georgia Public Safety Training Center in Forsyth, said his facility’s 275 active training courses include instruction in community policing and how to de-escalate confrontations.
“These are geared toward understanding your community and diverse groups,” he said.
All law enforcement trainees in Georgia must complete 408 hours of instruction at the Forsyth facility or one of more than two dozen other training academies across the state before they can hit the streets, said Mike Ayers, executive director of the Georgia Peace Officer Standards Training Council, which oversees certification of police officers.
But the average training requirement nationwide mandates 650 hours, he said.
“There are topics we are not able to address,” he said.
Ayers said one reason police officers in Georgia are leaving law enforcement in increasing numbers is they’re not getting enough “resiliency” training to help them cope with the mental stress that comes with the job.
“Police officers see the worst in society,” he said. “We have a tendency to project that onto everyone we encounter. … Hopefully, we can address these issues before they appear on the front page of a newspaper.”
Some of the law enforcement officials who testified Thursday pushed back on reform proposals that have surfaced across America during the recent protests, including defunding the police.
“Right now, there isn’t enough funding to have the police officers we need or the training they need,” Butch Ayers said.
Norris said taking away “qualified immunity” from police officers, which shields them civil lawsuits for actions they take that would be considered reasonable under the law, is also a non-starter in the law enforcement community.
“If you eliminate qualified immunity, you wouldn’t have anybody who wanted to do this job,” he said.
The study committee plans several additional meetings this fall. The panel is due to make recommendations by Dec. 15.
ATLANTA – Jobless Georgians filed 49,421 initial unemployment claims last week, up 7,341 from the previous week, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
First-time claims had been on the decline for seven weeks in a row, as Georgia businesses shut down last spring by the coronavirus pandemic reopened and brought back many of their employees.
More than 3.7 million Georgians have filed first-time unemployment claims since March 21, more than were filed during the last eight years combined.
On the positive side, most of those claims came early in the pandemic. As the state’s economy has reopened, unemployment has fallen from 12.6% last April to 5.6% last month, seventh lowest in the nation. Only Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, South Dakota, Vermont and North Dakota had lower unemployment rates than Georgia in August.
“As we continue to rebound from the economic devastation of COVID-19, we have seen our unemployment rate plummet the past several months on the statewide level and across Georgia in all our cities and communities,” state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said.
Meanwhile, eligible unemployed Georgians received a final round of supplemental payments this week through the federal Lost Wages Assistance (LWA) program, an initiative President Donald Trump announced last month after Congress failed to extend an earlier program that expired in July.
The LWA provided $300 weekly checks for six weeks, half of the $600 checks the earlier program had been providing.
Since March 21, the accommodation and food services sector has accounted for the most jobless claims in Georgia with 896,606. The health care and social assistance sector is next with 434,738 claims, followed by retail trade with 398,924.
More than 161,000 jobs are listed online at EmployGeorgia.com for Georgians to access. The labor department offers online resources for finding a job, building a resume and assisting with other reemployment needs.
“We have highly experienced staff to help to help get Georgians back into the workforce and business owners looking for employees to fill critical positions as we continue to recover from the pandemic,” Butler said.
Raphael Warnock is gaining ground in one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate races. (Credit: Warnock for Georgia)
ATLANTA – There’s been little movement since summer in either the presidential race in Georgia or Republican U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s re-election bid, according to a new Monmouth University poll.
But Democrat Raphael Warnock has made the Peach State’s other Senate contest a three-way race, according to a Monmouth Polling Institute telephone survey of 402 registered Georgia voters conducted Sept. 17-21.
President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden remain locked in a tight race in Georgia, with Trump’s slight lead of 47% to 46% well within the poll’s margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.9%. Trump and Biden were even at 47% in Monmouth’s July Georgia poll.
Perdue, who is seeking a second six-year term, leads Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff 48% to 42%, the same six-point margin of 49% to 43% the GOP incumbent held in July. The difference is Libertarian Shane Hazel’s support has increased from 1% to 4%, while the percentage of undecided voters has shrunk from 7% to 6%.
Warnock, pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, has scored major gains in the other Senate race, a special election with a crowded field of 21 candidates looking to complete the last two years of retired Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term.
Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp late last year to fill the seat on an interim basis, is holding a narrow lead in the Monmouth poll at 23%. Gainesville Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, who is leaving his Northeast Georgia congressional seat to run for the Senate, is close behind at 22%.
Warnock, who was languishing in fourth place in July with just 9%, has climbed to 21% in the new poll, good for third place.
“Back in the summer, it looked like this seat might be a Republican lock, but Warnock has started to consolidate Democratic voter support,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “We could see a two-party contest … after all.”
Warnock’s gains have come largely at fellow Democrat Matt Lieberman’s expense. Support for the son of former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut has fallen from 14% in July to 11% in the new poll, dropping him from third place into fourth.
“Warnock has been racking up Democratic endorsements over the past month to emerge as the party’s choice,” Murray said.
With so many candidates in the race, a runoff is likely. Georgians will have to go back to the polls in January if none of the candidates receives more than 50% of the vote on Nov. 3.
