Investment Fraud Lawyer Blog

Raymond James affiliates have been ordered to pay $2.1 million in fines and restitution to more than 15,500 of its customers for overcharging them in 27,000 transactions. Raymond James customers paid nearly $1.7 million in excess commissions, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). In addition, FINRA found that Raymond James’ supervisory systems were inadequate. The excessive commissions primarily involved low-priced securities (commonly known as penny stocks).

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Regions Financial Corp. is trying to find a buyer for Morgan Keegan, but the clock is ticking, and the longer it takes, the greater the likelihood that its most valuable asset, the advisor reps, will leave, thereby reducing the value, and making a sale unlikely to happen at all, according to Andrew Osterand’s InvestmentNews article entitled “Morgan Keegan’s 1,200 reps are waiting to see if parent bank Regions can find a buyer.”

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Raymond James Financial has agreed to buy back $300 million in auction-rate securities from clients and pay a fine of $1.7 million as part of a settlement the Securities and Exchange Commission and the states of Florida, Texas, Indiana, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, according to Bruce Kelly’s InvestmentNews article entitled “Raymond James to pony up $300M to buy back ARS.” The agreement reportedly calls on Raymond James to extend an offer to repurchase the securities within 30 days, and leave it open for 75 days.

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Raymond James Financial claims that it would face a loss of $25 million to $50 million if it is forced to immediately repurchase auction-rate securities that it sold to clients, according to an InvestmentNews article by Bruce Kelly entitled “ARS mess could cost Raymond James up to $50M.” That would cut into the firm’s total revenues of over $1 billion for 2010, as well as the average payout of $311,513 for each of the firm’s 3,237 registered representatives in 2010, according to InvestmentNews’ B-D Data Center.

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Expecting licensed professionals who provide investment advice to act in their clients’ best interests “should be a basic tenet of the business,” but brokerage firms and their brokers don’t want that fiduciary yoke, says Karen Blumenthal in her InvestmentNews article, “When Your Adviser Can’t Be Trusted.” Moreover, they don’t want the public to know that they don’t want to be held to a fiduciary standard. So, while brokerage firms profess to be trusted advisers or like a member of a client’s family in their advertising, their lobbyists are working hard to persuade the SEC to weaken the “devil in the details” definition of the term “fiduciary” for purposes of governing brokers’ relationships with customers.

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If you are an investor who lost money in the financial crisis, your stockbroker or investment advisor may owe you money. There are a variety of legal claims that can be brought for investment malpractice, ranging from fraud and misrepresentation to making unsuitable investment recommendations. But there are also legal deadlines for bringing such claims, and time may be running out if you have not yet discussed your options with a lawyer who handles investor rights claims.

Continue reading "Victims of Investment Malpractice or Other Financial Misconduct During the Recent Financial Crisis May Be on the Verge of Losing Legal Rights" »

The new whistleblower program that pays big cash rewards for tips about investment fraud has already resulted in a large number of high quality tips to the SEC, according to a news story this week on CNBC. According to the report, the SEC expects to receive 30,000 tips this year—just one year after the program was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. SEC Enforcement Director is quoted as saying “we’re gonna get information hopefully sooner on in the life cycle of a fraudulent scheme, so there’s less investor loss, less harm.” In addition to helping the feds detect fraud in the securities industry, however, the program promises to pay big financial rewards to the whistleblowers whom report it.

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While many investors who lost money when the auction rate securities market collapsed in 2008 have now been made whole by regulatory settlements and redemptions, others have not been as fortunate and are still holding on to illiquid securities. Because regulatory settlements focused on the worst offenders in the industry, not all firms that sold auction rate securities were included in the settlements. Furthermore, most of the regulatory settlements have only benefited smaller investors leaving many corporate, institutional and other investors to fend for themselves. According to Craig T. Jones of Page Perry LLC in Atlanta whose firm has represented many large investors in auction rate securities cases, “we are continuing to file arbitration claims for investors nearly 3 years after the market failure. A lot of investors have patiently waited to be made whole, and now that the statutes of limitations are starting to run out, they are realizing that they must take action in order to protect themselves legally.”

Continue reading "Large Investors Who Have Sustained Losses on Auction Rate Securities Investments Need to Take Action" »

Wall Street may face a wave of lawsuits under an expanded version of the Martin Act, New York’s securities anti-fraud statute, if the newly elected Governor of New York has his way, according to a Wall Street Journal Deal Journal blog entitled, “And the Next Mortal Threat to Wall Street Is…”.

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$130 billion of retail and institutional investor money is still being held in auction rate securities over two years after the $330 billion auction rate market failed and froze, according to Daisy Maxey in her Wall Street Journal article, “Still Frozen After All These Years.” But just as the Paul Simon song modulates from gloom into glee at the line, “But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers…,” there may be a way out for ARS holders who are ineligible for the buy-backs some firms have agreed to as a result of their settlements with regulators.

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A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) arbitration panel has ordered Raymond James & Associates, Inc. and one of its registered representatives to pay $925,000 to a Texas couple who purchased $1.4 million of municipal auction rate securities issued by Jefferson County, Alabama, according to August 26th articles in InvestmentNews by Bruce Kelly (“Raymond James pays more auction rate claims”) and in the Wall Street Journal by Suzanne Barlyn (“Raymond James Forced to Buy Back Securities”).

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Merrill Lynch and other Wall Street firms sold the riskiest tranches of collateralized debt obligations (“CDOs”), not just to institutions, but to individual investors, as safe investments, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Dan Fitzgerald titled “Didn’t See Risk, and Got Stung.” Now that the CDOs have imploded, and investors are seeking recovery of their losses, Merrill is telling them that risk disclosure documents and the investors’ supposed sophistication mean they cannot recover. Merrill is wrong for a number of reasons.

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Brokerage firms’ advertising portrays brokers as trusted members of the family, writes Tara Siegel Bernard in her New York Times article, “Trusted Adviser or Stock Pusher? Finance Bill May Not Settle It.” Anyone who has tried to hold a broker to a fiduciary standard of conduct, however, hears a very different response: “We are mere order takers. You never should have trusted us.”

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According to a recent Bloomberg National Poll, more than 50% of Americans despise Wall Street and favor punishment of the bankers who caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The majority of poll participants -- 56 percent -- say big financial companies are more interested in enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary people.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that “hundreds of businesses are fighting to recover billions of dollars tied up in frozen auction-rates securities, a year after Wall Street firms agreed to $60 billion in settlements over the collapsed market for the investments.” See “Firms Fight Banks Over Billions in Frozen Notes,” WSJ 1/2/10. While regulators stepped in to help individual investors after the auctions froze in February 2008, many corporate and institutional investors did not benefit from settlements between banks, broker-dealers and the SEC, FINRA and state attorneys general. According to Atlanta attorney Craig T. Jones, investors were left holding about $330 billion in illiquid securities when the auctions froze, so $60 billion in settlements is only a drop in the bucket.”

Continue reading "The Auction Rate Securities Debacle Continues - Corporate America Takes on Wall Street" »

Huge recruiting bonuses for brokers may bode ill for customers. Large brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney are offering some of the highest recruitment bonuses ever offered – up to 330% of their previous year's fees and commissions – to entice reps who rank among the top fifth of their firms' producers to come to work for them, reported Bruce Kelly in his November 15 InvestmentNews article, “Warring wirehouses add fuel to hiring fire.”

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Raymond James “long-suffering clients remain frozen in auction-rate securities hell,” says Gretchen Morgenson in her August 2 article in the New York Times called “Investors Without a Lifeline.” Raymond James misrepresented auction rate securities to retail investors as safe and liquid, just like many larger Wall Street firms that have settled with the regulators and agreed to buy them back. But Raymond James is refusing to buy back auction rate securities it sold to investors on the ground that it did not underwrite them, it just sold them. In its most recent quarterly filing, Raymond James further indicated that it lacks sufficient regulatory capital and borrowing power to buy back the securities, and says, if it were forced to do so, that “could adversely affect the results of operations,” according to the article.

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The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, an important Wall Street lobbying group, has decided to support the Obama administration’s proposal to hold brokers to the same standard as a fiduciary when they provide investment advice, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal. While investors who sue their brokers have long argued, with considerable success, that a fiduciary duty arises whenever there is a relationship of trust and confidence between broker and investor, that determination is presently made on a case by case basis under laws that vary from state to state. A federal standard, which is more likely to pass now that it has been endorsed by the industry, would make it easier for investors to prevail in claims against brokers.

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A new wave of lawsuits and arbitrations are being filed on behalf of investors who purchased auction rate securities but have not been eligible to participate in redemptions offered by big banks as a result of regulatory settlements. See article entitled “’Stranded’ ARS investors sue for a share of pie” by Jed Horowitz in the May 24, 2009 edition of InvestmentNews. These stranded investors purchased auction rate securities from “downstream” broker-dealers who sold but did not underwrite auction rate securities. The firms include Raymond James Financial Inc., Oppenheimer Holdings Inc., E*Trade Financial Corp., and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp., which were among the biggest distributors of auction rate securities, according to the article.

Continue reading "Investors Left Out of the Auction Rate Securities Regulatory Settlements Are Suing to Recover Losses" »

Since the collapse of the auction rate securities market in February 2008, many of the broker-dealers who sold those securities have made arrangements to help customers get their money back—either because of regulatory actions, because of lawsuits, or because it was the right thing to do. Raymond James was one of the firms that hawked auction rate securities as a safe cash equivalent, but it does not appear that Raymond James's customers have gotten any relief even though these securities were clearly misrepresented and most of the the investors who bought them have been unable to cash out for the last 14 months. Why are the regulators ignoring Raymond James and leaving that firm's customers out in the cold to fend for themselves?

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