After getting stung by the Arkansas Securities Department, the Voyager Financial Group LLC of Little Rock is facing another mess involving its former co-owner.
Kevin McNay has sued his former business partners, Andrew Gamber and Brandon Kogut, as well as VFG, charging that he didn’t receive all of the $900,000 he was promised when he sold his shares of the firm in 2012.
In the civil suit filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court, McNay said he was supposed to receive monthly payments for his shares, but the checks stopped coming in August 2013, leaving a balance of about $660,000.
McNay also is trying to collect the money from Gamber, who had personally guaranteed the payment.
The defendants “never planned on paying the full amount but rather planned on making VFG insolvent and starting another company,” McNay said in his lawsuit.
In better times, VFG was profitable. In 2011, it generated $4 million in revenue and a net income of $1.6 million.
But everything was turned upside down when the Arkansas Securities Department began investigating VFG.
Arkansas Securities Commissioner A. Heath Abshure slapped a cease-and-desist order against VFG, McNay and Gamber in April 2013 and ordered them to stop offering and selling securities in Arkansas. Abshure found the company was selling securities that weren’t registered.
McNay’s attorney, Tré Kitchens of Little Rock, said the ASD order doesn’t have anything to do with the lawsuit. McNay voluntarily entered into a consent agreement with the ASD, Kitchens said.
After the ASD order, the company went into a tailspin.
“I regret to inform you that VFG is insolvent, and has ran [sic] out of money,” Gamber said in a Sept. 5, 2013, email to McNay, which was included as an exhibit to the lawsuit. “I have been personally paying the payments on the notes for the past 3 months and have run out of money myself.”
In March, the ASD issued a second cease-and-desist order forbidding VFG and one of its employees, Richard Younkman of Dallas, to sell securities through the use of misstatements and/or omissions.
Kitchens said McNay is just trying to collect on the money that was promised him. “We’re going to seek to enforce the agreement that the parties entered into — nothing more, nothing less,” he said.