FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Betz Law Secures Award Against Former Chief Compliance Officer Who Approved Unsuitable High-Risk Bond Sales to Senior Investor

Charlotte, NC – May 19, 2026 — Betz Law, PLLC announced today that a FINRA arbitration panel awarded its client, Betty Parsonage, $82,600.00 in compensatory damages plus interest at 7.75% per annum against Randy Cleve Fox, the former Chief Compliance Officer of Portsmouth Financial Services ("PFS"), for his role in approving the sale of unsuitable, high-risk GWG Holdings L Bonds to a senior investor with limited assets.

The unanimous award, issued February 20, 2026, by an all-public panel in FINRA Case No. 24-01755, sends a clear message: compliance officers who rubber-stamp unsuitable investments—rather than serving as the gatekeepers they are required to be—will be held personally accountable for the harm their failures cause.

A Gatekeeper Who Failed His Post

GWG Holdings L Bonds were speculative, illiquid, high-yield instruments that carried substantial risk of total loss—risks that ultimately materialized when GWG Holdings filed for bankruptcy in 2022. As Chief Compliance Officer of PFS, Randy Fox held a position of critical trust: it was his responsibility to ensure that investments recommended to clients were suitable, that the firm's registered representatives were adequately supervised, and that the interests of customers like Ms. Parsonage were protected.

He did not fulfill that responsibility.

Instead of acting as the last line of defense against unsuitable recommendations, Fox approved the sale of GWG L Bonds to Ms. Parsonage—a senior investor for whom these instruments were wholly inappropriate given her financial circumstances, investment objectives, and risk tolerance. The panel found Fox liable on claims including negligent and improper conduct, breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, negligent supervision, and violation of applicable laws and industry rules.

Why This Award Is Exceptional — And Why Most Cases Never Get Here

The vast majority of FINRA securities arbitration cases focus on the first line of involvement: the registered representative — the financial adviser who made the recommendation, executed the trade, and sat across the table from the investor. Those are important cases, and holding frontline advisers accountable matters. But they represent only one layer of the supervisory structure that is supposed to protect investors.

Chief Compliance Officers occupy a fundamentally different position. They are the second line of defense — the institutional gatekeepers charged with designing, implementing, and enforcing the supervisory systems that are supposed to catch unsuitable recommendations before they ever reach a client. When a CCO approves a product for sale, that approval carries the weight of the entire firm's compliance infrastructure behind it. It signals to registered representatives that the firm has reviewed the product, assessed its risks, and determined it is appropriate for the firm's customer base. When that approval is wrong — when the CCO fails to conduct genuine due diligence, ignores red flags, or simply rubber-stamps a high-commission product without meaningful scrutiny — the damage radiates across every client to whom that product is subsequently sold.

Pursuing a CCO individually in FINRA arbitration is rare precisely because it is difficult. These are not simple cases. CCOs are sophisticated financial professionals who understand the regulatory framework, are typically represented by experienced securities defense counsel, and are positioned to argue that responsibility rested with the frontline adviser, the firm's supervisory principals, or the investor herself. They rarely appear in customer dispute records at all — which is itself part of what makes personal accountability so elusive. When a case does reach this level, respondents typically argue that the CCO's role was institutional rather than customer-facing, that any failures in supervision were the product of process breakdowns rather than individual misconduct, and that the claimant cannot establish the direct causal chain required to tie a compliance-level decision to a specific investor's loss.

This panel rejected all of that. The award against Fox is a rare and significant result — holding a compliance officer personally liable for the downstream harm his gatekeeping failure caused to a real investor with real losses. It required building a case that went beyond the recommending broker and demonstrated that the approval decision itself was a proximate cause of Ms. Parsonage's damages. That is a harder case to make, and a more important one to win.

Beyond the Dollar Amount — Why This Case Was Worth Fighting

An $82,600 award is meaningful to Betty Parsonage. But the significance of this result extends well beyond its economic value, and that is by design.

Betz Law accepts cases — and pursues theories within cases — based not only on their damages potential, but on whether winning them advances something that matters to the broader investing public. Holding a Chief Compliance Officer personally accountable in FINRA arbitration is that kind of result. The $82,600 awarded to Ms. Parsonage is a recovery for one investor. The precedent it sets — that CCOs who abdicate their gatekeeping responsibilities can be named, tried, and held liable in their individual capacity — is a message to an entire industry.

This is a distinction that shapes how Betz Law builds its cases from the outset. It is easy to name only the recommending broker and the member firm, limit the theory of liability to the most straightforward suitability violations, and settle for a number that makes economic sense given the claimed damages. That approach produces outcomes. It does not produce accountability at the levels of a firm where the real decisions about what products get approved, what risks get tolerated, and whose interests get protected are actually made.

Pursuing a CCO requires more: more investigative work to understand the firm's supervisory structure, more legal development to establish the causal link between a compliance-level decision and a specific investor's harm, more hearing preparation to anticipate and dismantle the institutional defenses that compliance professionals raise, and — critically — more willingness to try the case when the respondent chooses to fight rather than settle. It also requires accepting that cases built for accountability rather than pure economic efficiency may be harder, longer, and less predictable than standard suitability claims against frontline advisers.

Betz Law takes those cases because the financial services industry is not reformed by recovering losses from the representatives who implement bad decisions. It is reformed — incrementally, imperfectly, but genuinely — when the people who make those decisions face consequences too. Every award against a CCO who failed his post, every expungement denied to someone who tried to rewrite the record, every hearing where a compliance professional is cross-examined about what he approved and why, makes the next investor a little safer.

That is what this case was about. The award to Ms. Parsonage was the result. The accountability was the point.

Fighting for Full Accountability

The case required persistent advocacy across more than a year of litigation. After PFS—the member firm—reached a separate settlement with Ms. Parsonage, Fox moved aggressively to avoid individual accountability, filing a Motion to Dismiss and a request to expunge all references to the complaint from his industry record. The panel denied both with prejudice.

At the evidentiary hearing, the panel also granted Claimant's motion to strike Fox's expungement presentation, finding that the issues he sought to relitigate had already been decided. Fox's CRD record will permanently reflect his role in this matter.

The $82,600.00 award reflects compensatory damages of $120,000.00, reduced by income received on the L Bond investment and the prior PFS settlement—ensuring that Ms. Parsonage received the full measure of her compensable loss without double recovery.

A Win for Senior Investors

"This award affirms that compliance officers cannot hide behind their titles while abandoning their duties," said Demian J. Betz, founder of Betz Law, PLLC. "When a Chief Compliance Officer personally approves the sale of speculative instruments to a senior investor who cannot afford to lose that money, and then seeks to erase his record as if it never happened, we will pursue every avenue to hold him accountable. That is exactly what this panel did."

Betz Law was co-counsel in this matter alongside Matthew N. Thibaut, Esq. and Jason S. Haselkorn, Esq. of Haselkorn & Thibaut, P.A., Juno Beach, Florida.

About Betz Law, PLLC

Betz Law, PLLC is a Charlotte, North Carolina boutique financial services litigation and trial firm. The firm represents investors and financial services professionals in disputes against banks, broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, insurance companies, and their associated personnel—handling matters across the full spectrum of forums in which those disputes are resolved: federal and state courts, FINRA arbitration, and private arbitration before AAA and JAMS tribunals. Whether the claim involves investment fraud, unsuitable recommendations, breach of fiduciary duty, elder financial exploitation, failure to supervise, or complex insurance and annuity disputes, Betz Law brings the same disciplined, litigation-first approach to every matter it accepts. The firm is founded and led by Demian J. Betz (NC Bar No. 57639; VA Bar No. 48096), and serves clients at hearing and court venues throughout the United States.

Betz Law is a trial-ready firm—and that distinction matters.

Betz Law tries cases. The Parsonage award is a reflection of the firm's foundational commitment: when respondents dig in, so does Betz Law. The firm does not measure success by the speed of a settlement check; it measures success by whether its clients receive the full measure of justice their cases deserve—even when that means taking a case the distance in an evidentiary hearing, anywhere in the United States.

That willingness to try cases is not an abstract promise. It is informed by nearly two decades of firsthand experience inside the FINRA arbitration process at the highest level. Before founding Betz Law, Mr. Betz served as defense counsel for Wells Fargo Advisors and Wachovia Securities, trying 45 FINRA arbitration cases to conclusion between 2004 and 2020. He has sat at both tables. He knows how large broker-dealer defense teams prepare, how they evaluate cases, where they look for weaknesses, and—critically—what it takes to make them face real consequences rather than absorb a nuisance settlement and move on.

That institutional knowledge now works exclusively for investors.

When Betz Law enters a case, opposing counsel knows they are not dealing with a firm that will fold under motion practice pressure or postponement tactics. The result in Parsonage v. Fox illustrates the point: when PFS settled and Fox continued to fight—filing a motion to dismiss, seeking expungement, and attempting to relitigate resolved issues at the hearing—the panel granted Claimant's motion to strike his presentation, denied his expungement with prejudice, and awarded damages with interest. Cases like this do not end that way without a team that is prepared to try them.

Betz Law is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and represents investors in FINRA arbitration proceedings at hearing sites across the country.

Securities arbitration results depend on the specific facts and circumstances of each case. Past results do not guarantee or predict similar outcomes in future matters.