SEC v. L&L Energy, Inc. and Dickson Lee, CPA (undisclosed control blocks, 2016)

Judgment entered

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In February 2016 an SEC administrative law judge, by default, ordered coal company L&L Energy to disgorge $748,300 and pay a $2,675,000 penalty for falsely naming executives in its filings to hide that chairman Dickson Lee alone controlled it. Lee had settled and was criminally convicted.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

$2.7m

Disgorgement

$748k

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

$3.4m

Alleged gain

—

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

An SEC administrative law judge issued this initial decision on default on February 17, 2016, after L&L Energy, a Seattle-headquartered coal company operating in China and Taiwan, did not answer or take part in the proceeding begun in March 2014. The decision does not apply to Dickson Lee, who had settled with the Commission in 2015 and was convicted in a parallel criminal case in the Western District of Washington.

The decision finds that between about August 2008 and June 2009 L&L's filings falsely said that Lee's brother served as chief executive and that an employee who had declined the post was acting chief financial officer, including certifications bearing her unauthorised signature, when Lee ran the company single-handedly. The finding is about concealing who controlled the company. The company became public through a 2001 reverse merger, which is background, so the reverse-merger tag is replaced.

L&L was ordered to cease and desist from the antifraud, reporting and certification provisions, to disgorge $748,300 plus interest and to pay a $2,675,000 penalty. The decision was open to review and to a motion to set aside the default.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Undisclosed control blocks — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2016-02-17 Initial decision

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• Initial decision (ID-33)
• Order instituting proceedings
• Finality order

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.