This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision granting class action plaintiffs another opportunity to make their securities fraud claims against Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. The district court had previously dismissed the class action lawsuit as untimely under the 1934 Securities Exchange Act.…
US Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) has introduced a new bill to regulate investment-bank holding companies, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that state and federal regulators have yet to regulate. Collins says the bill, called the Financial Regulation Reform Act of 2008, seeks to restore public faith in the…
Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin is charging Oppenheimer & Co. with unethical conduct and fraud. The state’s top securities regulator is accusing the investment bank of continuing to market and sell auction rate securities to clients even as Oppenheimer executives were getting rid of their own ARS holdings, worth…
The North American Securities Administrators Association is reminding investors to ask the investment firms that sold them any now-frozen auction-rate securities about repurchase opportunities. Following the ARS market collapse, securities regulators in 12 US states joined together to form a multi-state Task Force dedicated to finding out whether Wall Street…
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. says it is fining Citigroup Global Markets Inc. $300,000 for its failure to reasonably supervise the commissions that clients were charged for stock and options trades. Citigroup Global Markets is Citigroup Inc’s brokerage and securities arm. FINRA says that between April 2002 and January…
In the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, former UBS Securities LLC Executive Director Mitchell Guttenberg was ordered to forfeit $15.81 million in alleged illegal profits, as well as serve 78 months in prison. Guttenberg is accused of taking part in an insider trading scheme that…
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. and a number of its workers have won an arbitration dispute filed by a couple that invested in a money market mutual fund. In U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge George Daniels confirmed the award. Konstantinos Karetsos and…
Angry investors in Hong Kong and Singapore began protesting last month over losses they suffered due to the collapse of Lehman Brothers credit-linked notes. Also known as mini-bonds, their value is now at pennies on the dollar, and investors want banks to buy the credit-linked notes back from them. Investors…
Lazard Capital Markets, LLC and a number of associated individuals have agreed to pay fines to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that over $600,000 was allegedly spent on entertaining Fidelity Investment traders to garner their business. While the SEC says the privately-held broker dealer failed to supervise the three…
At a hearing presided over by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington DC, the executives of Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings, the three top credit rating agencies in the country, were grilled about how their assignment of high ratings to mortgage-backed securities, while drastically underestimating…