Evarist C. Amah, of New Rochelle, New York, was a member of the Grail Movement, a European spiritual organization founded in the 1920s whose adherents maintain a settlement at Vomperberg in the Austrian Alps. He was also the head of ECA Capital Management LLC and general partner of the New Rochelle-based Lumine Fund. Between April 2016 and July 2019, Amah raised approximately $700,000 from nine fellow members of his religion by offering them two investment programs, one branded the Mountain Support Initiative, structured so that a portion of the profits would be donated to the Grail settlement in Austria. Investors were told they were doing two things at once: earning a return and financially supporting their shared faith. Within months, Amah had lost roughly 97 percent of their money. He did not tell them. Instead, according to the SEC, he continued to report modest positive returns, fabricated at least two performance statements to support the story, and kept soliciting.
The SEC charged Amah on August 9, 2021 in the Southern District of New York. On September 28, 2023, the court granted summary judgment to the Commission, finding that Amah had fraudulently solicited investments by consistently offering positive projections while failing to disclose the serious losses he was incurring. On July 2, 2024, Judge Kenneth M. Karas entered final judgment ordering him to disgorge $10,000 plus interest and pay civil penalties of $669,667. Amah appealed. On August 26, 2026, the SEC announced the modified final judgment that followed that appeal.
Two Programs, Nine Investors, and a Settlement in the Austrian Alps
The structure of the pitch is what made it effective. Amah did not approach strangers. He approached people who shared his faith, and he built the investment around that shared faith. The programs were called the Mountain Support Initiative and the MOSI-IT Special Project, referring to the Grail settlement on the mountain at Vomperberg that hosts festivals and religious activities for the movement’s members. Investors were told a portion of the returns would flow to that community. Amah drafted and distributed offering documents including a question-and-answer document and investment management agreements, giving the arrangement the appearance of professional structure.
The performance reporting was the core of the fraud. Amah told his clients he had generated modest returns on their investments. In reality he had already lost virtually all of their money. The SEC found he fabricated at least two performance statements to perpetuate the scheme and conceal what had happened. The court, granting summary judgment, described him as consistently offering positive projections while failing to disclose the serious losses he consistently incurred. Separately, the SEC alleged he breached his duties by favoring one client over the others, using the individual clients’ assets to pay expenses owed by the Lumine Fund, effectively making some investors subsidize others without their knowledge or consent. Affinity fraud of this kind, where the operator and the victims belong to the same religious or ethnic community, is a recurring enforcement pattern, as in the case of Leor Moshe of Capital Funding ASAP, who raised $47 million from members of his own Orthodox Jewish community.
An Appeal That Became a Landmark Ruling Against the SEC
Amah’s appeal produced a decision with implications well beyond his own case. On February 24, 2026, the Second Circuit affirmed his liability for securities fraud, affirmed the $10,000 disgorgement, and affirmed two of the three civil penalties. But it vacated his liability under the Investment Advisers Act. The question was whether Amah met the statutory definition of an investment adviser, which requires that advice be given for compensation. The SEC has long taken the position that a mere expectation of receiving compensation satisfies that element. The district court had accepted the SEC’s interpretation.
The Second Circuit held that this deference was improper under the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended judicial deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Citing Loper Bright, the panel wrote that judges may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous, and must instead exercise independent judgment. Because no judicial precedent had yet interpreted the statutory definition of investment adviser, the court vacated the Advisers Act liability and sent the question back to the district court to decide for itself. Legal commentators identified the ruling as among the first applications of Loper Bright as a defense in an SEC enforcement action, and as a signal that the Commission must ground its long-standing interpretations more firmly in statutory text.
A Penalty Cut by $223,229, and a Fraud Finding That Survived
On July 14, 2026, Judge Karas issued the modified final judgment. He cut $223,229 from the original penalty, the portion attributable to the vacated Advisers Act count, leaving $446,458 in civil penalties plus the disgorgement of just over $10,000, payable to the SEC within 30 days. The appellate court affirmed the bar preventing Amah from selling securities. What survived intact was the central finding. The Second Circuit stated that the district court did not err in concluding that Amah made materially false and misleading statements to investors. The reduction was a matter of which statute applied to him, not whether he deceived the people who trusted him. Amah has since moved from New Rochelle to Houston, Texas. The SEC’s guidance on affinity fraud warns that schemes exploiting religious or community bonds are among the hardest for victims to detect, because the ordinary instinct to verify is suspended by trust.
Conclusion
Nine people who shared a faith gave Evarist Amah about $700,000, believing part of what it earned would support their community’s settlement in the Austrian mountains. He lost nearly all of it almost immediately, told them it was growing, and produced fabricated statements to prove it. A federal court found he made materially false and misleading statements and imposed $669,667 in penalties. On appeal he won a genuinely significant legal point about how courts must read the securities statutes after Loper Bright, and it saved him $223,229. The fraud finding was affirmed. He owes $446,458 and cannot sell securities. The money his congregation gave him was gone within months of when they handed it over.
