Retirees who invested their life savings in a Marietta man’s $110 million Ponzi scheme can’t blame their losses on his former employer, brokerage and investment bank Oppenheimer, the Georgia Court of Appeals has ruled.
On Tuesday, the court upheld a Fulton County judge’s decision to dismiss two lawsuits brought against Oppenheimer by 13 Georgia investors and 30 others from North Carolina. They alleged Oppenheimer and two of its supervisors aided the unlawful scheme run by investment adviser John Woods, who was sentenced in February 2024 to almost eight years in federal prison.
Oppenheimer, where Woods worked until late 2016, argued it had nothing to do with the plaintiffs’ investments in Woods’ company, Horizon Private Equity III.
The appeals court said the plaintiffs, who invested from 2017 onward, failed to show their losses were a direct result of any Oppenheimer action targeted at them, ending their claims under Georgia’s racketeering and securities laws.
“Because the appellants did not invest in Horizon until Oppenheimer was no longer affiliated with Woods or Horizon, it is unclear how they could have possibly been Oppenheimer’s intended victims,” the court write in its opinion. “The appellants’ injuries are, at best, an indirect result or ‘eventual consequence’ of Oppenheimer’s alleged facilitation or cover-up of Woods’s criminal Ponzi scheme.”