Stock market fraud case includes a stop in North Charleston |

The nation’s stock market cops didn’t need to pull teeth to extract a settlement from a dentist turned investment adviser who rode out part the pandemic in the Lowcountry.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s complaint against Dr. Edgar M. Radjabli was filed at the Four Corners of Law in June and finalized in August, with the final judgment posted online a few weeks ago.

South Carolina became a geographical footnote in the case as investigators were questioning the 35-year-old from South Florida, who for a spell had taken up temporary residence in a modest rental home off Dorchester Road in North Charleston.

Federal authorities were onto him last year. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued him in New York in July 2020, citing “deceptive acts or practices” at his My Loan Doctor LLC investment fund.

The SEC followed suit this year. In a complaint filed June 11 in U.S. District Court in Charleston, the agency alleged that Radjabli and his Apis Capital Management LCC and My Loan Doctor engaged in “three separate securities frauds of escalating size.”

The case quickly caught the eye of Matt Levine, an irreverent and widely read Bloomberg finance columnist  who chronicles the ways of Wall Street.

“It’s a whole random pile of stuff,” the former Goldman Sachs investor banker surmised, a few days after the lawsuit hit the docket.

Radjabli’s first scrape with market regulators took place several years ago. He issued a public statement in June 2018 announcing that an affiliated venture called Apis Tokens had pulled in about $1.7 million from an unregistered investment offering “when in fact, no money had been raised,” according to the SEC.

Radjabli and Apis Capital made a much bolder move just months later. They announced an unsolicited $200 million offer in December 2018 for publicly traded Veritone Inc. by offering to pay an 82 percent premium for the shares they didn’t already own. The SEC later found that the would-be bidders “lacked the financing, or any reasonable prospect of obtaining the financing” they required to acquire the California technology company.

And though the buyout offer was withdrawn 10…