When federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unsealed a criminal indictment against Joshua Wander and Damien Alfalla on October 16, 2025, the collapse of 777 Partners finally had a face — two faces, to be precise. The FBI called it a "house of cards." The SEC described it as a years-long scheme in which investors and lenders were systematically lied to, collateral was double-pledged, bank statements were falsified, and nearly $500 million was put at risk, including the lifelines of structured settlement recipients — some of the most financially vulnerable people in America.
What the indictment did not do was explain why two of the most senior, longest-tenured figures at 777 Partners — men whose job titles placed them at the operational center of the very activities prosecutors now describe as criminal — appear to have walked away clean. Their names are David Hough and Juan Arciniegas.
The Machine They Built
To understand the significance of Hough and Arciniegas, you have to understand what 777 Partners actually was — and what it pretended to be. 777 Partners was founded in Miami in 2015, growing out of a management buyout from PennantPark. At its core, it operated a structured settlements business: purchasing future payment streams owed to personal injury plaintiffs, lottery winners, and annuity holders and packaging them as collateralized investment vehicles for institutional lenders. The subsidiary at the heart of this business was SuttonPark Capital, through which 777 secured hundreds of millions in lending from institutional investors, most notably Leadenhall Capital Partners, a London-based asset manager.
The structured settlements business was supposed to be the bedrock — boring, predictable, low-risk cash flows. What prosecutors allege is that beginning around 2018, founder Josh Wander began raiding those very cash flows to fund an entirely different, high-risk empire: soccer clubs, airlines, streaming platforms, film completion bonds, and insurance operations spanning multiple countries.
The FBI stated plainly: "Beginning in 2018, Wander began investing capital from the structured settlement business into new sectors with less certain cash-flow profiles, including streaming platforms, airlines, and professional sports teams such as Sevilla FC and Genoa CFC. Despite warnings from employees, including Alfalla, and contrary to the terms of the credit facilities, Wander directed that restricted funds from 777 Partners' lenders be used to cover the firm's acquisitions and expenses."
Two distinct functions within 777 Partners were responsible for enabling this: capital markets — raising money from lenders and pledging collateral — and sports, media & entertainment acquisitions — executing the purchases that restricted funds were illegally diverted to pay for. David Hough ran the former. Juan Arciniegas ran the latter.
David Hough: Head of Capital Markets at the Center of the Storm
David Hough holds a B.A. in Economics and English Literature from Bucknell University and a FINRA Series 24 license — a General Securities Principal certification, meaning he was qualified as a registered principal overseeing investment banking and securities operations. His career included stints at JPMorgan, Swiss Re (Vice President, Structured Finance), and a decade running his own advisory firm focused on debt and equity capital transactions.
His role at 777 Partners was not peripheral. His title, confirmed across multiple professional databases, was Operating Partner, Investment Principal, and Head of Capital Markets. Prior to that, per career records, he also held the title of CEO of Signal Financial Holdings — another 777-affiliated structured settlements entity.
Hough was not merely advising on capital structure. He was the head of capital markets at a firm that prosecutors say was systematically misrepresenting its capital structure to lenders. He ran a structured settlements subsidiary during the precise period when the FBI says those structured settlement vehicles were being stripped to fund unauthorized acquisitions.
The collateral fraud at the heart of the 777 case required people to actually generate, submit, and sign off on borrowing requests. Leadenhall's lawsuit alleges that 777's entities pledged over $350 million in assets as collateral "knowing all along that the assets either did not exist, were not actually owned by [777's] entities, or had already been pledged to another lender." The criminal indictment adds that 777 falsified bank statements and misrepresented its financial position while raising capital. That is, by definition, a capital markets function.
Hough left 777 Partners around 2022 — before the Leadenhall lawsuit detonated publicly in May 2024, and before the criminal charges in October 2025. He is currently employed as Managing Director at East West Bank. He has not been named in the FBI indictment, the SEC civil complaint, or the Leadenhall lawsuit. He has given no public statement addressing the fraud that occurred during his tenure. There is no public record of any law enforcement agency having questioned him.
Juan Arciniegas: The Face of the Sports Empire
Juan Arciniegas joined 777 Partners in 2016 — early enough to be considered a founding-era executive. He came from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he was a Vice President in the Financial Sponsors Investment Banking Group. At 777, he rose to Managing Director and Head of Sports, Media and Entertainment.
He was, in many ways, the public face of 777's most glamorous business line. He sat on the boards of multiple entities in the 777 portfolio, including FELA, ML Healthcare, Ata Football, and Fanatiz Holdings. He gave podcast interviews in 2021 describing the vision of a global sports investment empire. He was the person sourcing and closing the deals — Genoa, Vasco da Gama, Red Star Paris, Standard Liège, Melbourne Victory, and the attempted purchase of Everton.
The FBI's indictment states that restricted lender funds — money Leadenhall specifically advanced against structured settlement collateral — were diverted by Wander to "cover the firm's acquisitions and expenses." Those acquisitions were overwhelmingly the sports deals that Arciniegas was sourcing, negotiating, and executing. The FBI called out the move from structured settlements into sports teams beginning in 2018 — and Arciniegas was three years into his tenure at that point, responsible for exactly those transactions.
Arciniegas departed 777 Partners in May 2023 — more than a year before the Leadenhall lawsuit became public. The official statement from 777 Partners at the time: "777 Partners confirms that Arciniegas has left the firm to pursue other professional opportunities."
What happened next is telling. Arciniegas — alongside colleagues Jorge Beruff and Aaron Levy — brought and won an arbitration case against 777 Partners for "failure to pay benefits due," totaling $4,967,679.57. In January 2025, they filed a petition to confirm the award in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. There are two ways to read this: as a victim of a fraudulent firm that didn't pay what it owed, or as a strategically useful legal posture that reframes a senior insider as an aggrieved creditor rather than a participant.
By late 2023, Arciniegas had landed at Ares Management Corporation — one of the largest alternative credit managers in the world, with approximately $450 billion in assets under management — as a Managing Director in the Credit Group, where he now oversees a Sports, Media and Entertainment strategy. He took the 777 playbook to one of the most prestigious platforms in the industry.
Like Hough, Arciniegas is not named in the criminal indictment, the SEC complaint, or the Leadenhall lawsuit. He has made no public statement about the fraud that his deals helped enable. His professional biography presents his time at 777 as straightforward investment experience.
The Accountability Gap
In the 777 Partners case, the named defendants are: Joshua Wander (criminal charges), Damien Alfalla (criminal charges), and Steven Pasko (SEC civil charges). These are the architects and signatories. But a fraud of this operational complexity — sustaining a fraudulent collateral structure across hundreds of millions of dollars, executing dozens of cross-border acquisitions, maintaining relationships with institutional lenders across multiple years — does not run itself. It requires operators.
Hough's title was Head of Capital Markets. The fraud, at its mechanical core, was a capital markets fraud: false representations to lenders, falsified bank documents, double-pledged collateral, misuse of credit facilities. His FINRA Series 24 license is a credential that exists specifically to hold principals accountable for the supervision of securities activities. It is the kind of credential regulators point to when establishing that a person had the knowledge and duty to know what was happening in their area.
Arciniegas' proximity is of a different kind but equally significant. He was sourcing and closing the very acquisitions that the FBI says restricted funds were illegally diverted to finance. The question is not whether he orchestrated the fraud. The question is whether a sophisticated investment banker — with years of experience in financial sponsors coverage — ever asked where the capital for his billion-dollar sports acquisition spree was actually coming from.
There are legitimate prosecutorial reasons why these individuals may not have been charged. Federal prosecutors in complex fraud cases typically pursue decision-makers first. Cooperators are developed and additional indictments may follow. It is entirely possible that Hough and/or Arciniegas have already spoken with investigators. It is also possible that prosecutors cannot establish the criminal intent required for charges.
But that legal threshold is different from the public accountability standard that journalism exists to apply. The people whose transactions were enabled by the fraud, who benefited professionally from the 777 brand while it was being built on lies, who quietly departed before the walls closed in and resurfaced at prestigious institutions — those people have faced zero public scrutiny.
The Revolving Door of Prestige
David Hough is now a Managing Director at East West Bank. Juan Arciniegas is now a Managing Director at Ares Management, overseeing a credit strategy at one of the largest alternative investment platforms in the world. Neither has faced formal scrutiny. Neither has had to publicly account for their years at 777 Partners. Neither has answered — on the record, in a courtroom, or in any press interview — the simple question of what they knew and when they knew it.
Meanwhile, the structured settlement recipients whose restricted funds were misappropriated — personal injury victims, lottery winners, bereaved families, as multiple court filings describe — remain behind. The FBI said nearly $500 million was put at risk, including those lifelines. Those are not abstractions. Those are people who sold their future payment streams and trusted that the legal agreements protecting their interests meant something.
The Questions That Deserve Answers
On the public record, the following questions remain unanswered:
David Hough: As Head of Capital Markets at 777 Partners, did you have visibility into the compliance reports and borrowing requests submitted to Leadenhall Capital? As CEO of Signal Financial Holdings, what oversight did you exercise over how SuttonPark Capital pledged its receivables to institutional lenders?
Juan Arciniegas: The FBI has stated that restricted lender funds were diverted to fund sports acquisitions beginning in 2018. As the person who sourced and executed those acquisitions, were you ever informed — formally or informally — about where the capital was coming from? Did you conduct due diligence on funding sources? You won a $4.97M arbitration award after leaving in May 2023. Did you depart because you became aware of the fraud — and if so, did you report it to any authority?
To the DOJ, FBI, and SEC: Have Hough and Arciniegas been interviewed as witnesses or subjects? If not, why not, given their seniority and proximity to the core mechanisms of the fraud?
To East West Bank and Ares Management: Did your due diligence process when hiring these individuals include an examination of their roles during the period in which 777 Partners committed the fraud for which its principals are now facing criminal charges?
Conclusion
There is a predictable pattern in complex financial fraud: the person at the very top becomes the singular villain. The broader organizational ecosystem that made the fraud possible — that executed the transactions, raised the capital, built the empire — tends to disperse quietly into the financial system and re-emerge intact.
This is not a matter of presuming guilt. David Hough and Juan Arciniegas have not been charged with any crime. They may be entirely innocent of knowing participation in fraud. They may have been deceived by Wander just as Leadenhall's investors were.
But the record creates a reasonable basis for public inquiry that has not happened. The collateral fraud that forms the core of the criminal case was a capital markets operation — and Hough ran capital markets. The acquisitions that FBI prosecutors say restricted funds were illegally diverted to finance were executed by Arciniegas. Both men were senior, experienced, credentialed financial professionals who spent years at the institution under investigation. Both departed before the house of cards fell. Both have rebuilt their careers at respected institutions with no apparent scrutiny.
The victims of the 777 Partners fraud — the structured settlement recipients, the investors, the football clubs left in chaos across seven countries — deserve to know whether the full picture of accountability has been drawn. Based on the public record, it has not. The story of 777 Partners is not over. The question is whether the next chapter only has two names in it — or whether investigators, journalists, and the public are willing to ask harder questions about who else was in the room.
This report is based entirely on publicly available information. Neither David Hough nor Juan Arciniegas has been charged with any crime in connection with 777 Partners. The Ethics Reporter welcomes responses from either individual or their representatives.