The Honourable Ruben Castillo, of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, entered an order freezing the assets of defendants Dimitry Vishnevetsky of Chicago, and his company, Oxford Capital, LLC (OCL), a defunct Wisconsin limited liability company. The court’s order also prohibits the destruction of books and records.

The court’s order stems from a CFTC civil complaint also filed on 1 May, 2012, charging Vishnevetsky and OCL with fraud in connection with the operation of two commodity pools and an additional commodity trading scheme. According to the complaint, from at least the fall of 2006 through the present, the defendants fraudulently solicited and accepted at least USD1.74 million from pool participants and commodity customers.

The defendants allegedly defrauded pool participants by representing that their commodity pools had profitable performance records, based on audited results when, in fact, the defendants never conducted any trading for the pools. Vishnevetsky, individually and doing business as Hodges Trading LLC and Hodges Court Trading, also defrauded other pool participants by misrepresenting that Hodges issued Libor Notes and invested in commodity futures contracts to enhance the value of the purported Libor Notes, according to the complaint.

The complaint further alleges that the defendants misappropriated a portion of the pool participants’ monies and issued false account statements to them. The defendants defrauded customers by failing to open and fund commodity trading accounts for them, failing to place commodity trades for them, issuing fictitious account statements to them and misappropriating their monies, the complaint further alleges.

In its continuing litigation, the CFTC seeks civil monetary penalties, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, permanent registration and trading bans, and preliminary and permanent injunctions against further violations of the federal commodities laws, as charged.

The CFTC appreciates the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, which filed a criminal indictment against Vishnevetsky on 1 May, 2012.
CFTC Division of Enforcement staff members responsible for this case are Diane M Romaniuk, Heather Johnson, Ava M Gould, Scott R Williamson, Rosemary Hollinger, and Richard B Wagner.