Andrew Caspersen is now permanently barred from the investment industry. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the ban. Caspersen, who used to be the managing principal at Park Hill Group and is the son of financier and philanthropist Finn M. W. Caspersen, had pleaded guilty to criminal charges of securities…
The White House has appointed seven people to the Fiscal Control Board tasked with helping Puerto Rico deal with its $70B of debt. The appointees, named by President Obama, include: Jose Ramon Gonzalez (Federal Home Loan Bank of NY CEO/President), Arthur Gonzalez (Ex-bankruptcy Judge), Ana Matosantos (Ex-California Dept. of Finance…
UBS Puerto Rico clients have reported over the last few days the receipt of unsolicited settlement offers from UBS Puerto Rico for losses in customer accounts. The letters, which appear to be dated August 20, 2015 and are from Roberto Fortuno, Managing Director of the UBS San Juan Complex, offer…
After pleading guilty to two criminal counts of selling unregistered securities, The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”), the agency primarily charged with regulating the nation’s stockbrokers, finally barred former stockbroker, Jerry A. Cicolani, Jr. (“Cicolani”) from the securities industry. According to FINRA’s website, “FINRA has permanently barred [Cicolani] from acting…
Many of the people hit hardest by the massive collapse of the market for Puerto Rico bonds have been seniors and retirees, for two main reasons. First, seniors and retirees have the most amount of money available to invest on average. They have worked for their entire lifetimes, dutifully and…
The current quagmire of UBS Puerto Rico offloading billions of dollars in speculative Puerto Rico bonds onto its unsuspecting clients is by no means a new or limited occurrence for UBS. UBS has a history of taking huge gambles and often passing the bad bets onto its clients. Between 2002…
The level of co-dependence between UBS Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico over the past several years is shocking. UBS Puerto Rico has been operating for almost 50 years. It has grown to the point that it manages almost as much money in Puerto Rico as every other brokerage firm combined.…
Regardless of the research and industry standards that say that UBS should not have been selling Puerto Rico bonds the way that it was, inevitably UBS will still put forward a vigorous defense to the claims that investors are now bringing forward. Although each case will vary somewhat based upon…
UBS’s continual, massive sale of Puerto Rico municipal bonds and UBS’s proprietary Puerto Rico bond funds involves a number of failures of its legal duties, some of which vary by the individual facts of each investor. According to the SEC investigation, UBS Puerto Rico was ordered by its parent company…
UBS Puerto Rico A catastrophic collapse of life savings such as many investors in Puerto Rico bonds have been experiencing does not just happen on its own. There are inevitably a number of different parties that are involved, often to varying degrees. For most affected investors, the main party is…