The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overruled a decision by Judge Jed Rakoff of the District Court in Manhattan, according to a New York Times article written by Ben Protess and Matthew Goldstein (June 4, 2014). Judge Rakoff’s decision from 2011 rejected a settlement negotiated between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) […]
Citigroup, one bank that has been accused of scamming investors in CDO transactions, appears to have been scammed by another Wall Street Bank, UBS, that engaged in similar activity. The U.S. Department of Justice’s recent lawsuit against Standard & Poor’s has identified dozens of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that were allegedly given the highest AAA […]
Susan Antilla’s recent Bloomberg column summarizes the securities regulatory enforcement activity in 2011 as a series of breaks, favors and waivers doled out by the regulators to big Wall Street banks. To be sure, the regulators often lower the boom on the small players, but Wall Street is another matter. (“Wall Street’s Big Swingers Get […]
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced that it ordered Citigroup Global Markets, Morgan Stanley, UBS Financial Services, and Wells Fargo Advisors to pay more than $9.1 million for failure to supervise and failure to have a reasonable basis for recommending selling leveraged and inverse exchange traded funds. Each of the four firms sold billions […]
USA Today published an article yesterday reporting that Citigroup has been forced to pay at least $85 million to investors in its disastrous MAT/ASTA municipal arbitrage hedge funds. “Investor hedge fund claims costs Citigroup $85M and counting,” by Kevin McCoy, USA Today). That amount does not include payments made by Citigroup to at least 39 […]
The manager of Citigroup’s disastrous MAT/ASTA municipal arbitrage hedge funds, who left Citigroup in 2008 and now works in Bangladesh, recently told BusinessWeek that he has no regrets, no responsibility for what happened to investors, and would not have done anything differently. (“Ex-Manager Islam Has No Regrets After Funds Crash,” Donal Griffin and Anthony Effinger, […]
Just when you think you could not become more cynical, Citigroup comes along and throws an award ceremony honoring employees who concealed evidence of mortgage fraud from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). To make matters worse, the ceremony occurred in January 2011, long after “too-big-to-fail” Citigroup received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money (the most […]
What’s the difference between a Wall Street bank and a whistleblower? Nothing! While Wall Street railed against whistleblower protections for employees in Dodd-Frank, turns out they are falling all over themselves to blow the whistle on each other. Why? Because the first to tattle gets protections that are not offered to the second to tattle. […]
Congratulations to whistleblower Sherry Hunt of Silex, Missouri, a vice president of quality assurance at CitiMortgage, who will receive approximately $31.7 million or 20 percent of the $158.3 million that Citigroup agreed to pay to settle a False Claims Act suit involving mortgage fraud filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. It is the second-largest […]
Financial advisers are winning large arbitration awards against their former firms. During the past three months at least three arbitration panels have ordered financial services firms to pay millions of dollars to financial advisers formerly employed by the firms.
