Articles Tagged with Citigroup Global Markets Inc.

Citigroup Global Markets Broker Under Investigation 

Shepherd, Smith, Edwards & Kantas, a law firm specializing in representing wronged investors, is looking into securities fraud allegations against Timothy Kenska, a broker employed by Citigroup Global Markets out of Encinitas, California. Prior to that, he worked at Citicorp.  

According to his official record on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (“FINRA”) website, Kenska has seven “disclosures.”  FINRA is the regulatory body overseeing brokerage firms and registered representatives employed by them. A disclosure is an official complaint made or a claim filed against a broker/financial advisor.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is ordering Citigroup Global Markets Inc. (CGMI) to pay $11.5M in restitution and fines to resolve charges accusing the firm of displaying “inaccurate research ratings” on over 1800 stocks—that’s more than 38% of the stock that CGMI covers. According to the self-regulatory organization, the result of the inaccurate ratings was that a lot of customers ended up buying shares they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise if the right information had been provided.

Citigroup settled the case without denying or admitting to wrongdoing. The alleged inaccurate ratings would have been issued between 2011 and 2015.

According to the self-regulatory organization, CGMI showed the inaccurate ratings not just to retail customers, but also to its brokers and supervisors. These inaccuracies were caused by errors in the firm’s electronic ratings data feed that it provides to its clearing firm. As a result: the wrong rating was displayed for certain securities, ratings for securities that CGMI did not cover were provided, and/or the ratings for securities that the firm did rate were not displayed at all. The research ratings on CGMI’s actual research reports, to which brokers had access, were not impacted by these mistakes.

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