Just about eight months after federal prosecutors unsealed fraud charges against executives at subprime auto lender Tricolor Holdings, the Securities and Exchange Commission is now mounting its own case.
On Tuesday, the SEC announced fraud charges against a trio of former executives at Tricolor, which declared bankruptcy in September of 2025. CEO Daniel Chu, CFO Jerome Kollar and Senior Director of Finance Ameryn Seibold are facing charges “for their roles in an alleged multi-year scheme to defraud investors,” SEC officials said in a press release.
The SEC said the three executives “made numerous false and misleading representations to investors” about Tricolor’s financial health despite “significant liquidity constraints.” Tricolor had raked in more than $1.9 billion in asset-backed securities, or ABS.
“In offering materials and meetings, Tricolor allegedly represented that the loans included in the ABS collateral pools were free and clear of any other liens when the defendants knew that many had been or would soon be double pledged,” the news release said.
Per the complaint, Chu and Kollar misled investors about Tricolor’s finances even though both knew the company was “facing a growing liquidity crisis and edging closer to its eventual collapse.”
Some of Tricolor’s lenders found the company’s alleged fraud last summer and called Tricolor’s debt in September, the SEC’s complaint said. The company then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Since the bankruptcy proceeding is ongoing, “the full scope of the loss is currently unknown,” the complaint stated.
The SEC’s charges come in the wake of federal charges against Chu and Tricolor former COO David Goodgame unsealed back in December. In that case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, prosecutors charged Chu and Goodgame with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit both.
Kollar and Seibold also faced similar charges in that case, but both pleaded guilty at the time. An attorney listed for Kollar in that case didn’t immediately respond to the SEC’s latest charges on Tuesday afternoon.
Matthew Schwartz, who’s representing Chu, described the SEC’s case as a “rehash of allegations that have already been made against Mr. Chu by others over the past year.”
“Many of those allegations are inaccurate, as will be clear when the real facts come out,” Schwartz said in a statement. “We look forward to a full and fair hearing in the courtroom.”
Fallout from Tricolor’s collapse spread beyond the company itself. JPMorgan Chase, Fifth Third and Barclays each said they logged charge-offs worth over $100 million over their ties to the lender, Banking Dive reported. Those three banks also faced an investor lawsuit over Tricolor’s collapse, but a federal judge dismissed it in June.
