Ameriprise Financial Services and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) have settled an ongoing case in which Ameriprise was charged with failing to act on red flags regarding the theft of “more than $370,000 from five customer brokerage accounts by one of its registered representatives,” according to FINRA officials. The settlement involves a fine of… Read More >>
Raymond James, Robert W. Baird Penalized for Wrap Fee Problems
The SEC reports that two well-known investment advisory firms — St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Raymond James & Associates and Milwaukee-based Robert W. Baird & Co. — are “settling charges related to compliance failures within their wrap fee programs.” As part of the settlements, Raymond James is paying a $600,000 civil penalty and Baird is paying a… Read More >>
RBC Capital Markets Penalized for False Proxy Allegations
The SEC reports that investment bank RBC Capital Markets, part of the Royal Bank of Canada, will pay a $2.5 million settlement for “causing materially false and misleading disclosures about its valuation analysis in a proxy statement for Rural/Metro Corporation’s sale in 2011 to a private equity firm.” That firm was Warburg Pincus. Rural/Metro, a… Read More >>
SEC Bars Ex-Goldman Sachs Trader from Securities Industry
The SEC reports that Edwin Chin, the former head trader in residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) at Goldman Sachs, has “agreed to be barred from the securities industry and pay $400,000 to settle charges that he repeatedly misled customers and caused them to pay higher prices.” That payment represents $200,000 in disgorgement, $50,000 in prejudgment interest… Read More >>
Barclays to Pay $100M to Settle U.S. Libor Case
Barclays Bank and its investment banking arm Barclays Capital Inc. have agreed to a $100 million, 44-state settlement in the bank’s latest chapter of the alleged fraud stemming from the rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) and other benchmark interest rates, according to the office of Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general… Read More >>
BarCap to Pay $2M in CFTC, FINRA Fines
Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of the London-based banking multinational, has been hit with $2.1 million in fines for various reporting, clearing and trading violations, and for related supervision failures. Those penalties include an $800,000 fine from the CFTC and a $1.3 million fine from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA fined BarCap,… Read More >>
Deutsche Bank Fined $12M for Bad Squawk Box Talk
Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of the German institution, will be paying a $12.5 million fine for “significant supervisory failures” that allowed “confidential, price-sensitive information” to be spread among employees via the “hoot and holler” system of internal speakers or “squawk boxes” that populate trading floors and offices. Officials as the… Read More >>
Binary-Options Firms Fined $4.58M, Banned from Trading
Two web-based binary-options firms, Vault Options, Ltd. and Global Trader 365, have been hit with a $3 million civil monetary penalty, plus $1,587,731 in restitution, and have been banned from future trading, for defrauding their customers and violating the Commodity Exchange Act. The two companies, both based in Israel, apparently are no longer doing business… Read More >>
Fitch Ratings Fined $1.8M for Regulatory Breaches
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has fined Fitch Ratings €1.38 million ($1.8 million) for a series of negligent breaches of the Credit Rating Agencies (CRA) regulation. Following an investigation of credit rating agencies in 2013, the regulator discovered that from December 1, 2010 to June 7, 2012 certain senior analysts in Fitch sent… Read More >>
Citi and Others Sing the ‘Blue Sheet’ Blues
Regulators are continuing their crackdown on securities firms that send erroneous or incomplete information about their transactions as evidenced by the SEC hitting Citigroup Global Markets with the largest penalty so far — $7 million — for “a computer coding error” that caused incomplete “blue sheet” information about executed trades to be sent to the… Read More >>
