AXA Advisors Ordered to Pay $3.2 Million Over Ex-FA’s Alleged VA and Life Insurance Scheme
May 7, 2019 by Alex Padalka
AXA Advisors is on the hook for close to $4 million over alleged failures in supervising the variable annuity and insurance sales by one of its brokers and, in a separate case, alleged misrepresentations to 401(k) plan participants.
A Finra arbitration panel has ordered the firm to pay $3.2 million to a New York egg-farming family over an alleged variable annuity and life insurance scheme perpetrated by one of the firm’s former financial advisors, according to the law firm that represented the alleged victims.
Francesco Puccio, who was affiliated with AXA from 1999 to 2009 and again from 2011 to 2014, according to BrokerCheck, allegedly caused millions of dollars in damages to the Fitzpatrick family by rolling old insurance polices “stacked in egg carton boxes” that they weren’t aware of into newer and larger ones that paid him substantial commissions, the law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr & Kane says in a press release. In just one year, Puccio collected more than $200,000 in commissions, the law firm says.
“AXA sent a felonious broker to serve unsophisticated and elderly clients and then completely abdicated its supervisory obligations,” PWCK partner Jason Kane says in the press release. “Nonetheless, an unrepentant AXA contended throughout the arbitration that everything was ‘perfectly suitable’ and ‘beyond reproach.’ This elderly couple may have had wealth, but they did not have investment savvy. AXA and Puccio took them to the cleaners by recommending obviously unsuitable variable annuities and life insurance policies.”
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