On April 29, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint in the Central District of California against Anthony Joseph Cataldo, 75, of Beverly Hills, the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GT Biopharma, Inc., a clinical-stage cancer immunotherapy company whose shares traded on the Nasdaq Capital Market. The complaint, filed the same day Cataldo agreed to a $30,000 civil penalty to resolve it, alleges that between November 2020 and October 2021 Cataldo misappropriated approximately $3.2M in investor funds from the company’s bank account, including nearly $2.6M wired directly to cover the down payment on a $9.15M Beverly Hills mansion he was buying as his personal residence. He then wrote a personal check for the same amount to mask the withdrawal at quarter end, a check that bounced because his personal account held $101.65 at the time.
The SEC is also seeking a permanent bar that would prevent Cataldo from serving as an officer or director of any public company. The complaint was filed as Cataldo was actively pursuing a $17.1M NYSE initial public offering for his newest venture, EIR Biopharma, Inc., which filed its S-1 registration statement in February 2026.
A February 2021 Offering Raised $41M for Cancer Research That Cataldo Was Already Raiding Before the Closing
GT Biopharma conducted a public offering between February 11 and 16, 2021, raising approximately $24.7M from the sale of common stock and an additional $16.4M from the exercise of warrants. The offering documents, each version signed by Cataldo, contained a materially false statement: that the company intended to use the net proceeds for general corporate purposes including the funding and expansion of ongoing clinical trials and the development of its pipeline of cancer immunotherapy candidates. The company had no products, no revenues, and no income other than investor capital. Clinical research was the entirety of what GT Biopharma existed to do.
According to the SEC complaint filed in federal court, Cataldo was already running an unauthorized compensation scheme when he signed those prospectuses. Within two days of the offering closing, he wired himself an additional $100,000 in unauthorized payments from the company account. His authorized salary at the time was $30,000 per month. Between November 2020 and October 2021 he caused himself to receive 11 separate wire transfers from the company account that exceeded his authorized compensation by a total of $644,500, labeled variously as bonuses, expense advances, or expense reimbursements. No bonus plan existed at the company during this period, and neither the Compensation Committee nor the Board of Directors ever approved additional compensation. Cataldo was Chairman of the Board and would have been present at any meeting where such approval could have occurred. No such meeting took place.
A $9.15M Mansion Purchase Was Funded With a $2.575M Wire From a Cancer Company’s Bank Account
On April 13, 2021, Cataldo entered into a contract to purchase a mansion in Beverly Hills for $9.15M. The closing was repeatedly delayed because he did not have the cash to cover the required down payment. On July 20, 2021, Cataldo caused GT Biopharma’s bank account to wire $2,575,855.30 to the escrow company associated with the home purchase. The house closed two days later on July 22, 2021. As of July 19, the day before the transfer, GT Biopharma had approximately $39.4M in bank and brokerage assets. The nearly $2.6M Cataldo took the following day represented more than 6.5 percent of the company’s total liquid assets, taken for the down payment on his personal home.
In the weeks that followed, the company’s auditors began reviewing financial statements for the second fiscal quarter ending June 30, 2021. Cataldo never disclosed the $2.575M transfer. On August 23, 2021, he signed a management representation letter to the auditors stating that he had no knowledge of any fraud by company management and that no material events had occurred since the balance sheet date that required adjustment or disclosure. Both statements were false and Cataldo knew it.
A Bounced Check for $2,575,855 Exposed the Scheme When His Account Held $101.65
With the third quarter audit approaching, Cataldo attempted to conceal the missing funds by depositing a personal check for $2,575,855.30 into the GT Biopharma account on September 29, 2021, the last day of the fiscal quarter. The deposit created an immediate credit, and the company’s quarter-end bank balance appeared to include the funds Cataldo had taken. What the auditors reviewing that balance sheet did not know was that Cataldo’s personal checking account held $101.65 when he wrote the check.
On October 1, 2021, the check failed to clear due to insufficient funds. The nearly $2.6M credit was reversed, reducing the company’s account by the same amount on the first day of the new fiscal quarter. The auditors did not learn of the mansion withdrawal until December 2021, after Cataldo had been terminated. GT Biopharma’s third quarter Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC on November 10, 2021, contained no disclosure of Cataldo’s conduct. Between October 26 and December 7, 2021, Cataldo repaid the $2.575M to the company in installments. On April 29, 2022, he returned 1,845,000 shares of GT Biopharma stock to the company to resolve all outstanding claims against him internally.
A Career Built on Serial Biotech Tenures, a Fired Auditor, and a Film Company That Collapsed
The GT Biopharma fraud is not the first time questions have followed Cataldo out of a company. His career stretches back to Senetek, PLC, a British-listed biotech where he served as Chairman from 1995 to 1998 and where the market capitalization expanded significantly on the promise of treating erectile dysfunction. From there he moved into film production at Miracle Entertainment, where he allegedly told partners he had secured $150M in financing for movies that never materialized. The company never produced revenue, was late to file SEC paperwork, and was ultimately delisted.
At Calypte Biomedical, where he served as Chairman and CEO from 2002 to 2004, Cataldo fired auditor KPMG after the firm requested a more satisfactory internal investigation into concerns about questionable sales. The company burned through $25M in his final year and sold its major assets to a competitor shortly after his departure due to a lack of cash. Its securities registration was later revoked. He subsequently ran VoIP, Inc., M-Wave, Inc., Oxis International, and Genesis Biopharma, where he was replaced in a restructuring. He founded GT Biopharma in 2014, bringing back the same CFO, Michael Handelman, who had worked with him at Genesis. As of February 2026, Cataldo was serving as CEO of EIR Biopharma, a San Francisco-based preclinical eye disease biotech planning to raise $17.1M in an NYSE IPO, with two part-time executives and no full-time staff. The S-1 was filed on February 17, 2026, ten weeks before the SEC complaint was filed against him.
Conclusion
The SEC settled Anthony Cataldo’s case for $30,000 on the same day it filed the complaint, and is still seeking the officer and director bar that would prevent him from leading another public company. The bar has not yet been granted. Cataldo took $3.2M from a company that had no revenue, no products, and no source of money other than investors who believed their capital would fund cancer research. He used it to pay himself, buy a mansion, and then tried to hide the mansion payment by writing a check from an account with $101.65. He repaid the $2.575M and returned shares to avoid further liability from the company. The SEC’s civil penalty of $30,000 is a fraction of what he took. EIR Biopharma’s S-1 remains active as of the date of this publication.
It’s wild how someone could steal that much and use it for a mansion. What was he thinking?
I had over $5 million invested in that company he ran into the ground! Lost it all. The new CEO is no better! He pays himself huge salary and does nothing!
These phony CEOs should be jailed, instead Catalano got off for $30K fine! Unbelievable!