Merrill Lynch will pay $415M to resolve civil charges accusing the firm of misusing customer funds and not safeguarding customer securities from creditor claims. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the firm violated the regulator’s Customer Protection Rule by using customer funds inappropriately instead of depositing them in a…
HSBC Finance Corp., an HSBC Holdings Plc. (HSBC) unit, will pay $1.575B to settle a shareholder class action securities case that was brought in 2002. The case involves Household International, the consumer finance business that HSBC purchased in 2003. Household International is now HSBC Finance. Household shareholders accused the company…
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Puerto Rico law that would have let its public utilities restructure $20 billion of debt. The territory’s officials enacted the Recovery Act in 2014 in an attempt to help it deal with its $70 billion of debt. Puerto Rico’s large public utilities owe…
A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel has awarded former NBA basketball player Keyon Dooling and ex-NFL athlete John St. Clair $819,000 in damages in their securities case against Morgan Stanley (MS). The two men accused the firm of negligent supervision of a former broker whom they blame for their…
In the High Court in London, the trial in the lawsuit brought by the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) against Goldman Sachs (GS) is under way. The sovereign wealth fund claims that in 2008 the Wall Street bank misled it about a number of derivatives transactions, causing it to lose $1.2B…
FINRA is fining Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. (OPY) $2.2M for the sale of non-traditional exchange-traded funds, including inverse, leveraged, and inverse-leveraged ETFs, to retail customers without proper supervision and for suggesting them to clients even though they were not appropriate investments for them. The self-regulatory organization is also making the…
The Securities and Exchange Commission says that Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC (MS) will pay a $1M penalty to resolve charges involving its purported failure to protect customer data. Some of this information was hacked and violators attempted to sell the data online. According to the regulator, the firm did…
Citibank (C) is the first U.S. bank to settle allegations of benchmark interest rate manipulation. To resolve the Commodities Futures Trading Commission claims that it manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rates (LIBOR), Citibank will pay $250M. It will pay $175M to resolve Euroyen Tibor and Yen Libor rigging claims. Also…
SEC Files Fraud Charges Against Former State Street Executive The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is filing fraud charges against ex-State Street Corp. (STT) executive Ross McClellan. According to the regulator, McLellan was one of a number of people who purposely charged hidden markups on certain transactions to customers, making…
Megan Messina is suing Bank of America (BAC). She is a managing director at the bank’s structured credit products division. In her lawsuit, Messina claims that the bank tried to get rid of her when she questioned the way some clients were treated and complained about the sexism she allegedly…