At the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s yearly conference, the SRO’s CEO, Richard Ketchum, talked about how investment advisers and brokers that sell complex instruments to retail clients should be able to write on a “single page” the reasons why the product is in the best interest of that investor. Ketchum…
Speaking at Compliance Week’s yearly conference, Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Whistleblower Office Director Vincente Martinez said that personnel in corporate compliance should have an understanding of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’s anti-retaliation provisions that are part of its whistleblower requirements. Martinez noted that while companies…
Former Sentinel Management Group Inc. CEO Eric Bloom and head trader Charles Mosley have been indicted for allegedly defrauding investors of about $500 million prior to the firm’s filing for bankruptcy protection in 2007. The government is seeking forfeiture of approximately that amount. The two men are accused of fraudulently…
A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel has ordered Advanced Equities, CEO Dwight Badger, and Chairman Keith Daubenspeck to pay one of their former brokers $4.5 million in compensatory damages. The ex-broker, John Galinsky, had accused all three of them of not paying certain commissions on his work to raise…
Irving Picard, the trustee in charge of liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, has filed nearly a dozen clawback lawsuits seeking to recover more than $1 billion from investments by “feeder” funds tied to the failed financial firm. Picard has been working to recover the money of the victims…
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing about the Investment Adviser Oversight Act of 2012, a bill introduced by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.). The two lawmakers had come up with (HR 4624) because they believe that the US Securities…
In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus Capital Group Inc. v. First Derivative Traders, the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona is now saying that investors did not succeed in stating a securities fraud claim against Prescott City, Arizona related to the $35 million…
The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut has decided not to grant summary judgment to UBS AG (UBS) and UBS Securities LLC in Mary Barker’s lawsuit claiming that her firing violated the whistleblower provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Judge Janet Hall found that UBS failed to show that…
The SEC is suing investment adviser John Geringer for allegedly running a $60M investment fund that was actually a Ponzi scheme. Most of Geringer’s fraud victims are from the Santa Cruz, California area. According to the Commission, Geringer used information in his marketing materials for GLR Growth Fund (including the…
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants the US Supreme Court to leave standing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s decision upholding Irving Picard’s “net equity” approach to compensating victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scam. Picard is the Securities Investor Protection Act trustee of Bernard L. Madoff Investment…