With DOJ Charges, Former VC Mike Rothenberg Could Now Be Facing Serious Jail Time

Connie Loizos writing via TechCrunch: While some in Silicon Valley might prefer to forget about investor Mike Rothenberg roughly four years after his young venture firm began to implode, his story is still being written, and the latest chapter doesn’t bode well for the 36-year-old. While Rothenberg earlier tangled with the Securities and Exchange Commission and lost, it was a civil matter, if one that could haunt him for the rest of his life. Now, the U.S. Department of Justice has brought two criminal wire fraud charges against him, charges that he made two false statements to a bank and money laundering charges, all of which could result in a very long time in prison depending on how things play out. How long, exactly? The DOJ says the the two bank fraud charges and the two false statements to a bank charges “each carry a maximum of 30 years in prison, not more than five years supervised release, and a $1,000,000 fine,” while the money laundering charges “carry a penalty of imprisonment of not more than ten years, not more than three years of supervised release, and a fine of not more than twice the amount of the criminally derived property involved in the transaction at issue.” The damage done in the brief life of Rothenberg’s venture outfit — even while understood in broad strokes by industry watchers — is rather breathtaking. As laid out by the DOJ, Rothenberg raised and managed four funds from the time he founded his firm, Rothenberg Ventures, in 2012, through 2016, and his criminal activities began almost immediately…