Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Investment group points to lavish spending on sports cars and private jets under Ted Rollins' leadership


Ted Rollins
A group of activist investors seeks to take Campus Crest Communities in a more professional direction following the ouster of founding CEO Ted Rollins amid allegations of profligate spending. News reports indicate New York-based Clinton Group Inc. might engage in a proxy fight to take over the company

A letter dated February 16, 2015, from a portfolio manager for Clinton Group, states that executives under Rollins made extensive use of luxury sports cars and private aircraft. Clinton Group has developed a partnership with Campus Evolution Villages (CEV) in an effort to reshuffle the management team and get Campus Crest on a profitable path.

The wild spending under Rollins came as his ex wife, Sherry Carroll Rollins, and their two daughters were forced to periodically live off food stamps in Birmingham. That's because of a grossly unlawful divorce decree issued in Shelby County by Circuit Judge Al Crowson. The judgment was wildly one-sided in Ted Rollins' favor, especially when you consider that Sherry Rollins initiated divorce proceedings in Greenville, South Carolina, where the family lived--meaning jurisdiction was established there, and the case could not lawfully be heard in Alabama.

On top of his personal ties to Alabama, Rollins has strong business connections to the state. His corporate law firm is Birmingham-based Bradley Arant, and Campus Crest developed student-housing properties at four state universities (South Alabama, Troy, Auburn, and Jacksonville State). A project at the University of Alabama was canceled when Rollins was ousted last November.

Recent articles in the business press use terms like "blunders" and "loss of credibility" to describe Rollins' performance. But the issues were much uglier than that.

As Rollins convinced Wall Street to heap more than $800 million on his company, we were reporting about his conviction for assault in the brutal 1995 beating of his stepson in Franklin County, North Carolina. (See documents at the end of this post.) We also reported that Rollins had been the subject of a social-services investigation, based on a citizen complaint in North Carolina about possible sexual abuse of the same stepson.

Wall Street was well aware of the messiness in Rollins' personal life. Paula Poskon, an analyst with Robert W. Baird and Company, learned in October 2012 about Rollins' criminal record and the child sexual-abuse allegations. Poskon's reaction to this news? "Oh, my God, I was not aware of any of that. . . . It certainly sounds like I need to do a lot more digging."

Did Poskon do more digging? Apparently not. A few months later, she tried to strong arm me into retracting her statements about Ted Rollins.

Wall Street did not get alarmed, it seems, until Campus Crest Communities took a financial nosedive under Ted Rollins' leadership.

It's unclear if Clinton Group knows, or cares, about the ugliness in Ted Rollins' past. But the investment group clearly is unhappy with the way Rollins conducted his business affairs. From the aforementioned letter, written by senior portfolio manager Joseph A. De Perio:

In forthcoming proxy materials, we will expound in great detail on all the missteps of the Company overseen by the Board of Directors. And we will expose what we see as a lack of leadership and strategy both in the executive suite and at the Board of Directors itself, severely lacking management and board governance and approval processes (as evidenced by questionable site selection and construction practices), weak operating procedures, all of which (and much more) has led to operating results that fall well behind the Company's peers.
The Board of Directors, the majority of which has been in place since the IPO in October 2010 has overseen shareholder value destruction of 43% since the IPO. All the while, the Board has lavished the Company's executives with luxury sports cars (the Maserati and the Tesla are the ones we know about) and excessive use of private aircraft from a related party. In addition, we will raise questions about the other related party insurance transactions between Fortegra and CCG, the low stock ownership of the Board, and lavish corporate spending.

That's tough talk, and De Perio was just getting warmed up. He and his partners clearly plan to take the company in a new direction, one way or another:

We are sending this letter to the incumbent Board of Directors now as we believe a costly and distracting proxy contest should be avoided for the benefit of Campus Crest's shareholders. In our last two proxy contests in which we sought and prevailed in replacing a majority of directors, Stillwater Mining, Inc. and EVINE Live, Inc. (fka ValueVision Media, Inc.), management and incumbent directors spent $4.3 million and $3.5 million, respectively, on defensive and entrenchment endeavors. Our expenditures were a fraction of those amounts, as we were spending our own money and not the shareholders', and the proxy contests ended in decisive votes in favor of Clinton Group's nominees.

We are available if the incumbent Board of Directors would like to have a meaningful discussion, but we continue to ready our proxy materials and shareholder communications. We plan to encourage other shareholders to contact us to find out more about the details of our plans and the expertise of the players involved and will further encourage them to speak their minds to the Company's existing leadership.

We've shown that Ted Rollins tends to create messes in his personal life--the documents below are proof of that. Now we know that he also creates messes in his business life.

It looks like Clinton Group is determined to clean this mess up.




11 comments:

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Karen Hudes on March 4, 2015 at 2:54 am said:

You forgot to mention state capture, censorship of all the news media, manipulation of commodities prices including gold, assassination of Lincoln, JFK, shooting Reagan, getting to keep the seignorage (difference between face amount of currency and cost of printing the currency), usur , and treason with the planned destruction of US currency, the loss of the US AAA credit rating and the reserve currency status with it. We’ve had quite enough, thank you. https://s3.amazonaws.com/khudes/notarialprotest.pdf

CLINTONS, BUSHES, ET AL ET AL are all SHAREHOLDERS' and the key word? GLOBALISTS. When the decision was decided to make US a globalist commodity, the people dumb-dumb and stupid-stupid, were no problem!

Legal Schnauzer you write about the truth and you get put in jail, TIL the fear of all that saw what happened to you gets real deep in the psyches.

TED ROLLINS IS THE EPITOME OF OUR SYSTEM OF AMERICAN "TRADE AND EXCHANGE". AND, AND, WERE HE NOT CAUGHT IN HIS DEGRADATION OF TOO MUCH POISONING FOR THE CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT? WOULD STILL BE IN CHARGE OF PSYCHOPATHY US 101.

America got the psychopaths to be more insane than the criminals' that have been considered to be insane for lock-up.

And we know what is running the country into the cesspool of history - ROLLINS' ET AL and not a dime's worth of difference in the worst of our species to those that have decided they're more "chosen".

Anonymous said...

Just when you think Ted Rollins can't look any worse, you find out he was throwing money at fast cars and private jets while his ex wife and two kids survive on food stamps. What a guy!

Chairman said...

You just can't make up guys like this. Wonder how much investor money he spent on playthings.

Anonymous said...

Where was the board of directors when all of this was going on? Out to lunch, perhaps?

Nan said...

A Maserati and a Tesla? Sounds like Ted has good taste in cars.

Anonymous said...

What are the details of the assault case you had against him?

legalschnauzer said...

I didn't have an assault case against him--it didn't involve me. The victim, who brought the case, was Mr. Rollins' stepson, Zac Parrish. The two documents at the end of this post, from Franklin County, NC, show Mr. Rollins' arrest and conviction for assault. Here is a link to a post that provides more details, including an eyewitness account on videotape from Sherry Rollins, Mr. Rollins' wife at the time and the victim's biological mother:

http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-was-campus-crest-ceo-ted-rollins.html

Anonymous said...

Ted Rollins has been committing acts of predatory that are obviously uncontrollable rage.

He is chemically toxic or whatever clinical label is attached to a human that no longer has the power of will.

A poisoned zombie.

Rollins has fallen out of favor with the even bigger predators than him.

Whoever takes him down is the power that he was once in the circle jerk with, elite club can't allow too weak to expose the crazies that have handlers.

Rollins wasn't big enough for a handler, obviously.

Anonymous said...

Play GOD.

Pretend we are GOD, the one that is so powerful that all energy gets to be at one time or another, in the hands of GOD, to co-create infinite forms of more energy.

The forms of energy have a Will, the same Will that the GOD has, clearly the energy of the larger has to be part of the smaller.

What to do with this power?

Rollins abused his GOD power of Will and forced himself upon boy children - he decided that whatever Will he had, had been broken ? and therefore he had to repeat the "Will"?!

Tragically the American system decided to break the Will of the people, collectively certainly and the individual?

When a system has as many "lawyers" running the United States of America's Free Will Power into the criminally insane 'reality' we are living ...

Do we FIRE GOD?

How do we DEMAND our FREE WILL to be restored?

What POWER do we exercise, here people, as a count into the millions in America alone, to STOP!

Stop the contamination of our GOD BORN WILL, Free of Slavery.

We certainly must STOP the Ted Rollins that run the USA.

NO WILL, those that have committed too many coups on the United States.

Slaves are the system which predators and parasites own, manage and work. That is, so called "banks" and of course the "checks and balances" ("courts").

A whole being Ted Rollins isn't.

We are in the internet power of full transparency in absolute speeds of lights.

No reason whatsoever to continue allowing the breaking of our Will, by way of those that have hired Ted Rollins to obviously break the Will of innocents.

Guess the time has come to grow our Will to survive and thrive into the power we each are. Then we change our "minds" and do the job of cleaning up "society."

Great reporting Schnauzer, absolutely you are great!

Thanks

Anonymous said...

by the way,

to "Attorn" literally means to give one's free will to another because the individual isn't capable of exercising the will to be free ...

and, then but of course, the "attorney-at-law" gets to be the will of the not free.

The not free gets duped into being not intelligent enough to communicate and/ or speak, the language of ?

In South Africa the changing of the language so the natural born people couldn't be free, that was called an Apartheid.

No free will in the system which the USA has turned into only a place for retirement portfolios of those that play god of earth.

Courts USA are an Apartheid. Plain and simple.

KOCH INDUSTRIES are reforming the criminal justice system, all should give as much will power to this project as we can, otherwise the will to be free goes away until the energy changes.

Bad enough already, Koch Industries has joined with the "liberal" groups too, to reform this system of no free will.

Anonymous said...

There were actually two Teslas. One driven by Sharpe was purchased by a "friend" of a BOD member. The other one, driven by Rollins, was turned in with the Maserati since the dealer demanded both vehicles to take back the Maz.
You ask where was the BOD in all this? Flying to Jamaica with Ted. On that infamous Falcon 900.