Centrex lawsuit dismissed | Roglieri's Co-Conspirator plea | Major TX HB 700 update

Several important stories have come out since we left for the holiday weekend that I want to catch you up on, including a critical amendment in TX HB 700.

Centrex lawsuit dismissed

A company called Fundmerica was suing software company Centrex, a related company named Forth, and stakeholders Trey Markel and Kris Kehler for an alleged data breach. After a years-long court battle, FundMerica dismissed the case and had to release the following statement:

"MINEOLA, NEW YORK / ACCESS Newswire / May 23, 2025 / The Lawsuit commenced by FundMerica against Centrex, Forth, Trey Markel, and Kris Kehler in California state court has been dismissed by FundMerica. FundMerica does not dispute that the data incident that compromised the Forth and/or Centrex platforms was caused by and attributable only to malicious third-party actors who were not associated with Centrex, Forth, Trey Markel, and Kris Kehler. FundMerica accepts as true that neither Forth nor Centrex had any involvement in the data incident at issue. Any prior statements made by FundMerica to the contrary are retracted and withdrawn.

Contact Information

Andrew Kamins

Attorney

akamins@murraylegalpllc.com "

Without getting into any legal issues, this is a critical win for Centrex and its stakeholder as it clears their name of fault in this incident. I think the statement tells you what you need to know in regards to the positive outcome for Centrex, Forth, Trey Markel, and Kris Kehler. Now they can put all of this behind them and focus on growing their business, which services commercial lending.

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Kris Roglieris' Co-Conspirator Pleads Guilty

The Kris Roglieri case just got more interesting. Someone who worked with him, Christopher Snyder, pleaded guilty recently in the Northern District of New York court to 1 count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Safe to say that this is not a good development for Roglieri.

What Christopher Snyder did

From Count 1: 'In furtherance of their scheme to defraud, SNYDER, Roglieri, and Co-Conspirator-1 transmitted and caused to be transmitted numerous interstate wire communications, including a wire transfer that Roglieri initiated from his Warren County residence to KeyBank, N.A. servers in Ohio on or about December 22, 2023, transferring $950,000 of a new Prime client’s $5 million ICA payment to an older Prime client as partial loan funding for the older client’s real estate project.'

Amount of money stolen

From the Plea Agreement: "The parties agree that the offense involved a loss of more than $25 million but less than $65 million."

Penalty and restitution

Christopher Snyder is looking at a sentence of 87 months in prison as written in the plea agreement, but the judge has the final say. There will also be a period of up to 3 years supervised release, and he is ordered to pay a $233,000 judgment. Mr. Snyder's sentencing is set for Sept 16th.

With all of this information, we still can't be sure whether Mr. Syder will testify against Kris Roglieri. Roglieri's trial was pushed back until January 5th because the prosecution says they needed more time.

Unnamed Co-Conspirator

As mentioned above, there is a 3rd unnamed co-conspirator who used the title of Executive Vice President for Prime Capital. A search on LinkedIn can give you some possible names, but I won't mention any of those. Whoever it is will likely have charges against them soon, as the government made mention that a superseding indictment is expected shortly. There are several things that could be related to, but one could guess it would be charges for more of the credit line transactions. The prosecution only started with 1 transaction, the egg farm project which Prime Capital required a $5 million deposit, possibly because that was the path of least resistance to proving a crime was committed.

One name I have been asked about for those following the case, because her house was raided, is Kimmy Humphrey, a business partner of Kris Roglieri. Her name has not come up in recent court documents or published articles.

What happened to Berone Capital Fund LP?

In the early days of this case, it was reported that Kris Roglieri was blaming a hedge fund named Berone Capital Fund for the issues with not providing the Line of credit as promised in his agreements with clients, but that hedge fund has not been mentioned anywhere recently in this case. They supposedly were his backer for the funding. To sum it up, it wasn't a thing, just as I suspected when I wrote that Kris' story didn't make sense.

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Texas proceeds with Sales-Based Financing Bill HB 700 with one major amendment

This Texas bill has already made headlines with some of the disclosures and restrictions initially, which fortunately have been reduced to a certain extent, where people could see some of the benefits and were wary of other aspects of it. Well, last night there was an amendment brought by Senator Charles Perry (R) that could make it all but impossible to make Sales-Based Financing (see revenue-based financing and mca) in the state of Texas. The amendment is as follows:

"Sec. 398.056. CERTAIN AUTOMATIC DEBITS PROHIBITED. A provider or commercial sales-based financing broker may not establish a mechanism for automatically debiting a recipient's deposit account unless the provider or broker holds a valid perfected security interest in the recipient's account under Chapter 9, Business & Commerce Code, with a first priority against the claims of all other persons."

What does that mean?

It means that if passed with this amendment, it would create a barrier to these types of commercial transactions that is higher than any other state. It would mean that a funder would have to agree with the merchant on the security interest in the deposit account as mentioned above, or find other legal ways to make these transactions. One thing that comes to mind is having to perform old-fashioned Credit Card Splits. However, those used to take 1-3 days to set up. There may be more options, but for now, we will have to wait to see what happens before the Texas Legislature adjourns on June 2nd, 2025.

The Revenue Based Finance Coalition has been very active in working on this bill and is currently educating lawmakers on how major an impact this would be for revenue-based financing transactions if this were to pass.

Stay tuned for more updates on this as we continue to get them from the RBFC.