Apollo Paid Itself Some Fees and Gave Itself Some Loans

There is a genre of Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action in which someone starts an investment fund, raises money from investors and then blows that money -- or some of it, anyway -- on personal expenses. A feature of this genre is that the SEC lists the personal expenses in some detail, because they are funny. Really anyone's personal expenses, pulled from their context in life and placed into the context of an SEC enforcement action, will be funny. "I can't believe this dope spent investor money on bagels, whiskey and in-game purchases on his phone," I'll laugh, as though there were other things to spend money on. But also, people who steal from their investment funds tend to spend the money on certain kinds of expense, and those expenses just read funny. If you catered to people running crooked investment funds, you could run a very profitable steakhouse, or a Ferrari dealership, or like eight strip clubs. You'd have a harder time with a used bookstore.

But when a senior partner at Apollo Management allegedly takes money from Apollo's investors to spend on his personal expenses, the SEC is blandly abstract: