Ronald E. Blaylock, the founder, a principal and major shareholder of Blaylock & Company, formerly Blaylock & Partners LP, was fined $125,000 and suspended from the securities industry for 20 days by the National Association of Securities Dealers for failing to file adequate expense reports and for receiving reimbursement from the firm for personal expenses.
The NASD action, which was not related to any specific municipal bond transactions but affects a member of the municipal securities market, was disclosed in the associations monthly disciplinary actions.
Blaylock neither admitted nor denied the charges and a spokesman for him declined to comment.
But the NASD said that between Jan. 31, 1997, and Aug. 10, 2001, he violated its rules by filing 61 travel and expense reports containing 85 incorrect entries and received about $22,700 of the companys funds to which he was not entitled. Blaylock reimbursed the firm for those funds.
According to the NASD, Blaylock discovered the improper reimbursements in response to two regulatory investigations. The first discovery occurred in early 2002 as he responded to a subpoena in an unrelated investigation into misconduct by another firm. The second occurred in early 2003 during a follow-on probe by the NASD relating to his expense reporting.
The problems occurred in part because Blaylock interchangeably used his personal and business credit cards and because he was late reporting his expenses, the NASD said. Also, his reports were filled out by assistants based on his calendar, which often contained inaccurate information. Blaylock sometimes recorded persons as attending events, when they did not do so, to lower his average per-person cost of entertainment and also used default names for people he could not remember, the NASD said.
