Recent statements and past online postings have raised questions about the work history of City Councilman Justin Brannan (D-Bay Ridge), one of several lawmakers now vying to become the next Council Speaker.
As of Wednesday, many of those questions remained unanswered.
Brannan worked at a venture capital firm that was forced to shut down after federal authorities charged it with misleading investors.
But his online footprint doesn’t allude to Advanced Equities’ troubled past, and a bio that appears on his website no longer includes any mention of his venture capital work.
Two years ago, Brannan’s online bio did cite his work in venture capital, but that was before his push to become Council Speaker. In the earlier iteration of his site, Brannan shared that after touring the world with a punk rock band, he worked in VC, “where he successfully raised millions for a number of renewable energy startups based out of Silicon Valley.”
According to his current LinkedIn page, the Brooklyn councilman worked as a private equity broker at Advanced Equities for nine months, from June 2008 to Feb. 2009.
But on Wednesday, Brannan told the Daily News that he was an intern there and at the time studying to get a Series 7 certification, which is required to buy and sell securities.
Advanced Equities closed shop in 2012 after paying out a $1 million settlement to the Securities and Exchange Commission over charges that it misled investors. The SEC’s cease-and-desist order against Advanced included charges that during two private equity offerings in 2009 and 2010 one of the company’s co-founders Dwight O. Badger overstated order backlogs for Bloom Energy, a fuel cell vendor, which Advanced was working on behalf of and which now-deceased General Colin Powell once served on the board of.
Forbes magazine also dinged the firm, noting in one 2008 article that it “left a wake of aggrieved customers, furious former employees, lawsuits and more than their share of busted startups.”
“This place is a stereotypical bucket shop,” one AE broker told Forbes then. “The deal flow is a joke.”
When asked about his time at Advanced Equities, Brannan said that he was a “trainee” and that he did little more than pick up coffee for the bigwigs.
“I was an intern. I fetched coffee for people,” he said. “The people I fetched coffee for were the ones doing that work. Interns weren’t privy to any of that stuff.”
But a LinkedIn page for Brannan, which was recently taken down, appears to allude to a bigger role at the firm and states that he worked as a private equity broker there from June 2008 to February 2009. When asked about that, Brannan said he would have had to have had a Series 7 certification to serve in that role, but he did not immediately respond to the discrepancy between his LinkedIn profile and his assertion that he was an intern at the time.
The Daily News also asked Brannan to explain why an earlier version of his website claims “his journey continued into venture capital where he successfully raised millions for a number of renewable energy startups.” To that, he said he wasn’t referring to Advanced Equities, but declined to go into much detail about what he actually was referring to.
“It was a guy, a guy who had his own family office,” he said of his VC work. “But it wasn’t those guys.”
Brannan did not provide that man’s name, but said in a subsequent email that after leaving Advanced Equities, he was “taken under the wing of an impact investor for a family office who was raising money for start-up alternative energy companies based in Silicon Valley.”
“I learned the ropes but eventually, I decided none of this was for me and I left the industry altogether,” he said, adding: “I would never put blame on an intern for anything that he or she had no knowledge of and no responsibility for.”
Advanced Equities was also slapped with a lawsuit in 2009 accusing it of treating women as “little more than sexual objects” and maintaining a work environment where “pornographic videos” were “openly displayed.”
The plaintiff in that lawsuit, Heather Donohue, alleged at the time that Frank Mazzola, the head of the company’s New York office, and other brokers frequently displayed porn on their computer monitors “for all to see.”
Brannan, who’s served one term on the Council and represents the 43rd Council District in Bay Ridge, said he didn’t recall seeing any of that.
“I don’t remember that at all,” he said.
An ally of Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams, Brannon is considered the favorite in his Council race against Republican Brian Fox. He’s also a contender to become the next Council Speaker, a job currently held by Corey Johnson, who will step down on Dec. 31 due to term limits. That role is decided by a vote among sitting Council members, but by the general public.
Other Council members vying for the Speaker’s spot include Adrienne Adams, Diana Ayala, Carlina Rivera, Keith Powers and Francisco Moya.
