2017
Nearly $341,000 in restitution has been paid to investors in a company whose fraud stretched from Southeast Asia to southeast Texas to West Africa.
Alan Derek Jernigan, who sold investments in deals that would purportedly export medical test kits to the Philippines and Malaysia, was sentenced to 10 years probation on May 22 in Brazoria County State District Court.
Jernigan pleaded guilty to securities fraud, one of the three charges in his indictment, in 2016. He lived in the Houston area when he sold the investments and later moved to Lakeway.
As a condition of his probation, Jernigan was taken into custody after sentencing to begin serving 60 days in the Brazoria County jail.
Full restitution of $340,960 was paid to five investors. The terms of the probated sentence also require Jernigan to make monthly payments to provide full restitution to a sixth investor.
Attorneys in the enforcement division of the Texas State Securities Board assisted Brazoria County Criminal District Attorney Jeri Yenne in prosecuting Jernigan.
Jernigan sold investment contracts while telling investors he had secured export contracts with the governments of the Philippines and Malaysia to sell them testing kits and other medical supplies.
The contracts did not exist, and Jernigan never exported any medical supplies. He did send investor funds overseas, however – to a bank in the Republic of Benin in West Africa.
Jernigan didn’t disclose previous financial problems to investors. In 2007 he filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy petition in the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. The bankruptcy was pending when Jernigan sold the investments.
Jernigan also did not disclose an unpaid $53,847 civil court judgment against him in Maryland in a case filed by an investor in a similar medical supplies investment program.