A prominent U.S. college football coach has been accused of malfeasance at his second job as a hedge fund owner.
Tommy Tuberville, the head football coach at Texas Tech University, his partner and his hedge fund were sued by several investors—whom Tuberville said were also employees—who allege that they were misled and that Tuberville and his partner, John David Stroud, used TS Capital Partners as something of a personal piggy bank.
According to the lawsuit, Tuberville and Stroud gave clients false information, while lying by omission at other times. It also accuses the two men of commingling their own assets with those of the hedge fund, and of failing to register the fund with regulators.
Tuberville denied the allegations.
Tuberville “has never even met or spoken with most of the plaintiffs and he is acquainted minimally with the few other plaintiffs only because they were employees at TS Capital Partners, LLC,” his lawyer said in a statement. “Coach Tuberville absolutely never solicited any investment from any of these or other individuals. It is important to note that Coach Tuberville himself invested significant funds and has never received any return from his own investment. Accordingly, he is hopeful the plaintiffs, who were employees, can help to provide answers as to what transpired. Coach Tuberville has cooperated with every regulatory inquiry and not a single one has asserted that he was involved in any wrongdoing. He intends to vigorously defend the allegations made against him and is confident he will be exonerated.”
Stroud backed his partner up.
“Given Coach Tuberville’s lack of involvement with the day-to-day operations of the company, as well as the fact that he did not solicit the plaintiffs, Mr. Stroud can only surmise that he was named in this lawsuit to garner unwarranted media attention, which has apparently succeeded,” Stroud’s lawyer said in a statement.
The lawsuit, filed in Alabama federal court—TS is based in Auburn, where Tuberville coached for Auburn University for 10 years—indicates that the plaintiffs are afraid they’ll lose all of the $1.76 million they invested from 2008 until last year, noting they have no “credible information regarding the current location and amounts of their invested funds.”
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