Alleged Investor Scam Shut Down : Investigations: The SEC accuses L.A. brokerage, nine other defendants of bilking people out of millions.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday accused a Los Angeles brokerage firm, Brokers Investment Corp., and nine other defendants of defrauding investors of at least $48 million through “boiler-room” sales.

Nearly all the defendants simultaneously signed a consent decree, under which they neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, agreeing to various injunctions and to repay any “ill-gotten gains,” said Sylvia M. Scott, an SEC assistant regional administrator.

In a civil complaint filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the SEC alleged that Brokers Investment Corp. and its 115-member sales force used the telephone to persuade about 6,000 investors nationwide--including nearly 675 in Southern California--to invest a total of $109 million between 1989 and mid-1992. BIC is no longer operating.

The money was to be invested in several ventures affiliated with U.S. Fiberline Communications, a small telecommunications concern in San Diego. But at least 12 of the partnerships “were blatant frauds” because much of the cash went elsewhere, Scott alleged. (Fiberline and its principals also were defendants in the action.)

Those 12 partnerships alone raised $77 million, which was at least $48 million more than was needed to fund the Fiberline businesses, Scott said. The excess was used by the executives of BIC and Fiberline for their own benefit, or was used for a Ponzi scheme, in which existing investors were paid with fresh cash raised from new investors, the SEC alleged.

Under terms of the consent decree, a receiver will be appointed to run the Fiberline companies and try to repay investors through the companies’ revenue, asset sales and from the owners themselves, Scott said. “We’re hopeful they’ll get a good chunk of their money” back, she said. The BIC principals named as defendants included Chief Executive Norman D. Shubert and Chief Financial Officer Daniel Steinberg, both of Calabasas.

Michael Matthias, a lawyer for the BIC defendants, said his clients “fully cooperated” with the SEC and settled “so that immediate efforts could be made to maximize the value” of the investors’ partnership interests.