DALLAS — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been indicted on three felony charges alleging securities violations. ADVERTISING DALLAS — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been indicted on three felony charges alleging securities violations. The Collin County grand jury’s
DALLAS — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been indicted on three felony charges alleging securities violations.
The Collin County grand jury’s indictments are believed to have been issued on Tuesday, and then immediately sealed. They are to be unsealed on Monday, when Paxton, presumably, would surrender.
Paxton paid a $1,000 fine for improperly soliciting business when he was a member of the state Legislature. He thought the matter was behind him, but a grand jury took the case.
“As we’ve said for 14 months now, there was no criminal action because there was no crime,” Paxton’s spokesman Anthony Holm said on July 24. “This was solely a civil event with a $1,000 civil penalty.”
As Paxton’s political career flourished, so did his business career. Since he joined the House in 2003, Paxton has a portfolio of almost 30 business interests. He previously had pledged to put his business interests into a blind trust but it’s unclear whether he has done so.
The state board fined and reprimanded Paxton for improperly soliciting business in 2004, 2005 and 2012.
Paxton and the head of the McKinney, Texas-based Mowery Capital Management, Frederick “Fritz” Mowery, worked in the same building.
Records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show Paxton earned thousands of dollars by referring at least six of his private law clients to Mowery, who is now accused of “unethical and fraudulent conduct” by the state.
Paxton maintains that it was an innocent lapse.
In 2011, he encouraged investors to put more than $600,000 into technology company Severgy, Inc., according to The New York Times, while not telling them he was making a commission on their investment and misrepresenting himself as an investor in the company.
“We went into this knowing that the Texas Rangers would uncover whatever evidence was there and if there was a sufficient amount that we would present it to a grand jury, so that’s what we did,” Kent Schaffer, one of the special prosecutors assigned to the case, told The New York Times. “The grand jury elected to indict, and the indictments all speak for themselves.”
