The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District has issued an order giving Irving Picard, the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC liquidation trustee, permission to issue a second interim distribution to the victims of the Madoff Ponzi scam. Picard had asked to add $5.5 billion to the customer fund…
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said that Citigroup (C) and UBS (UBS)cannot preliminarily enjoin Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration over an auction-rate securities offering that did not succeed. The case is UBS Financial Services Inc. v. Carilion Clinic. Carilion is a nonprofit health care and…
The London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (LIBOR) manipulation scandal involving Barclays Bank (BCS-P) has now opened up a global probe, as investigators from the United States, Europe, Canada, and Asia try to figure out exactly what happened. While Barclays may have the settled the allegations for $450 million with the UK’s…
A Financial Industry Arbitration panel has decided that ex-UBS Financial Services broker Pericles Gregoriou can keep $1 million of the signing bonus he was given when he joined the financial firm even though he left the company earlier than what the terms of the hiring agreement stipulated. Gregoriou worked for…
A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel is ordering Morgan Stanley Smith Barney to pay $5 million to Todd G. Vitale and John P. Paladino, two of the brokers that the financial firm had wooed from UBS AG (UBS) in 2008. The two brokers are alleging fraudulent misrepresentations, breach of…
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…
UBS Financial Services Inc. of Puerto Rico (UBS) has agreed to pay $26.6 million to settle the Securities and Exchange Commission administrative action accusing the financial firm of misleading investors about its control and liquidity over the secondary market for nearly two dozen proprietary closed-end mutual funds. By settling, UBS…
Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), UBS AG (UBSN), Morgan Stanley (MS), and Citigroup Inc. (C) have consented to pay a combined $9.1 million to settle Financial Industry Regulatory Authority claims that they did not adequately supervise the sale of leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds in 2008 and 2009. $7.3 million…
With their share of the high-net-worth-market expected to drop down to 42% in 2014 from the 56% peak it reached five years ago, wirehouses are looking to regain their grip. According to Cerulli Associates, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC), Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MS), and UBS…
According to a report published by Cornerstone Research, there has been a decline not just in the number of securities class action settlements that the courts have approved, but also in the value of the settlements. There were 65 approved class action settlements for $1.4 billion in 2011, which, per…