Articles

Why Only Big Bankers Can Flout the Rules and Get Away With It

Did you hear the one about the stock promoter, the lawyer, three figurehead CEOs and seven auditing firm partners?

No, it isn’t a “walks into a bar” joke. It’s a case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month against the players in a sham stock offering. The agency went after all the people involved in what it called “a massive scheme to create public shell companies through false registration statements.”

No big deal, right? The SEC is supposed to be going after bad guys, making them pay fines and lose privileges. But it tends to do a lot better in cases against no-name boiler room types like the ones in the January case than it does with players at powerful banks.

In my column for TheStreet this week, I discussed the contrast in enforcement results between cases against small players and cases against Wall Street’s elite.

In December, for example, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, brought cases against ten household name firms for flouting the rules that govern research analysts when their firms are pitching for initial public offering business. In its complaints against the firms, Finra described the actions of specific people who broke specific rules. But we never learned their names. Indeed they weren’t charged at all. You can read my column here.

Even Snowden Would Have His Hands Full Cracking Wall Street’s Arbitration Secrets

Say you hire a broker. You start out thinking he or she is terrific, of course, or you wouldn’t have signed up in the first place.

And then they wind up churning your account. Or putting you into mutual funds only because the funds generate high fees — for the broker, not you. Or persuading you to buy high-risk products that have no place in a portfolio like yours.

So you get around to thinking you’d like to sue. Well, tough luck, Mr. or Ms. Investor — you can’t. The day you opened that account, you signed a document saying you’d be willing to give up your right to court, and that you’d instead use Wall Street’s private arbitration system if your broker fleeced you. Welcome to Finra arbitration.

Public-minded politicians have tried for years to get laws passed to ban so-called “mandatory arbitration,” but all their efforts have failed. Wall Street’s lobby is a powerful one. Recently, though, a coalition of consumer groups wrote to a task force of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), which runs Wall Street’s arbitration, pressing for more disclosures about investigations of Wall Street’s private tribunals.

In my most recent column for TheStreet, I talk about the secrecy that surrounds Finra arbitration. You can read the column here.

Internal Memo at Sterling Jewelers: Men Make 12.5% More Than Women

In the ongoing gender discrimination case against Sterling Jewelers, owner of Kay Jewelers, Jared the Galleria of Jewelers and 10 other chains, an arbitrator this week released a 118-page opinion that moves the fight to a new stage and reveals new information about pay disparities and sexual harassment.

Kathleen Roberts, a former U.S. magistrate judge and an arbitrator at JAMS in New York, said that the women may proceed as a class with their claim challenging Sterling’s pay and promotion practices. She declined to let them proceed with another claim of intentional discrimination.

Because it’s private arbitration, most of the documents are not public. But the law firm for the women was permitted to post Judge Roberts’ opinion so that the thousands of women in the class would have details about this next stage in their case.

The judge referred to several internal company memos that show that Sterling has been aware of pay disparities between men and women for years. From my story in The New York Times on Feb. 3:

In her ruling, the judge cited an internal company memo from 2006 that said female hourly sales employees made 40 cents less an hour than their male counterparts on average, adding up to more than seven million annual affected hours. A memo the next year said that men at Sterling’s stores, which include Jared the Galleria of Jewelry, were paid 12.5 percent more base pay than women and that women at the management level were getting higher performance scores but receiving lower pay increases than men.

The judge also talked about evidence of sexual harassment. More from my NY Times story:

Women in some cases were expected to undress publicly at company events and “accede to sexual overtures,” the judge wrote. She cited evidence of “references to women in sexual and vulgar ways, groping and grabbing women” and soliciting sexual relations, sometimes as a quid pro quo for job benefits.

You can read my story here. The judge’s opinion is here. And a story that I wrote for The Times about the case last year is here. Sterling has 1,700 stores in all 50 states. Chances are you’ve done business with some of these guys at your local mall.

In Push for Change, Finra Is Opposed by the Wall St. Firms It Regulates

Brokerage firms are up in arms over a proposal by one of their regulators to collect information about customers’ accounts and use it to keep tabs on salespeople.

That may sound like a great idea on the face of it, but the regulator in question, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, gets its funding from the firms it’s supposed to be regulating. And those firms don’t like the idea of sharing data on their customers’ buys, sells and portfolio positions.

I wrote about the battle between Finra and its members in The New York Times today. Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told me that Finra’s proposal to get monthly data about activity in investors’ accounts could go a long way in preventing fraud because it would let Finra jump on problems more quickly:

“It creates a real deterrent,” she said. “Who’s going to churn an account if it immediately sends off a warning siren at Finra?”

You can read the story here.

SEC Boasts Record Wins but Powerful Execs Remain at Large

Top regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission have been taking victory laps for having scored a record 755 enforcement cases in the fiscal year that ended September 30. Enforcement chief Andrew J. Ceresney said in a press release that the agency was holding wrongdoers accountable.

But it’s enlightening to see which wrongdoers he’s talking about, because the SEC has been under fire for wimping out when it comes to going after individuals.

In a telephone interview, Ceresney told me that 70 percent of the agency’s cases in 2014 were against individuals. Bet you didn’t know that. Dig deeper into the cases, though, and you find this result: Only 15 were against national or international institutions. Of those, only four named individuals.

Here’s my story for TheStreet.com.

Case “closed” on accounting problems at RCS Capital, but were problems fixed?

It was only three months ago that RCS Capital Corp. told shareholders in a quarterly report that it was in the process of remediating “several significant deficiencies” in its internal control over financial reporting. Since then, shareholders have been told that all is well — sort of. But the company has not specifically told shareholders that the deficiencies have been addressed and solved.

RCS is the holding company for a collection of brokerage firms and other financial companies. One of them, J.P. Turner Associates, was purchased by RCS this year, and has a horrific history of customer complaints and regulatory action against executives at the top of the company. Here’s my story about Turner.

Along with its bad judgment in picking acquisition targets, RCS also has the baggage of having employed Brian S. Block as its CFO for most of 2013. Block is the guy who resigned under a cloud on Oct. 29 as CFO of American Realty Capital Properties Corp., which announced that he and another senior financial executive had intentionally covered up an accounting error. Both RCS and American Realty Capital Properties are controlled by real-estate mogul Nicholas Schorsch.

On that news, shares of both RCS and American Realty Capital Properties plunged.

Since then, RCS has said publicly that it hired a law firm and forensic accounting firm to examine the books for the first nine months of 2013. That was a period when Block was signing off on the financials. Michael Weil, CEO of RCS, said in a conference call with analysts on Nov. 13 “We consider the question of RCS Capital’s accounting integrity as closed.” But the forensic probe was limited. For example, it didn’t include an examination of emails.

RCS first flagged its accounting deficiencies in its March 31, 2014 quarterly report. It subsequently mentioned the deficiencies in filings on May 6 and May 29. Among other problems, it noted in the May 29 filing that its auditors had been given “multiple versions” of the company’s books and records.

In other words, seven months before Block resigned in the American Realty Capital Properties scandal, RCS was noting significant problems in its accounting during the period Block was its CFO. The company of course could have brought that up in its analyst call last week, and if it was all fixed, management could have said so.

Instead, RCS carved out a nine-month period, authorized a limited investigation, and declared that the issue was closed. To really close it, though, RCS needs to tell what it did about the deficiencies it mapped out in that May 29 filing, and why investors can be assured that problems like that won’t happen again.

RCS, by the way, declined to comment when I sent a detailed list of questions to its outside PR firm. Here’s the story I wrote about it for TheStreet.

Brokers Countersue to Thwart Suits by Unhappy Investors

So your broker sold you some shoddy private placements and you sued? Brace yourself, because you might get sued back.

In The New York Times today, I told the story of investors who sued their brokers for selling them private placements that tanked only to be hit with a suit from the broker. The firms’ argument: That the customers signed indemnification agreements when they purchased the securities, and thus owe the firms money for legal fees and other costs.

“The investors make representations to buy these things” and have a legal obligation to be truthful, said Vincent D. Louwagie, a Minneapolis lawyer who represented the brokerage firm Berthel Fisher.

It’s tough to evaluate the cases when the firms win. If you do business with a brokerage firm, you are stuck in private arbitration, where nobody has to explain how they came up with a decision. Suffice it to say, though, that a lot of customers will get spooked when they find out they’re threatened with a countersuit after they already have lost money. You can read the story here.

Unfazed by Finra Charges, Seniors Still Swoon for David Lerner Pitch

Elderly investors are looking for yield. And elderly investors are suckers for a free meal. Put the two together and you’ve got a recipe for packing the grand ballroom of a Marriott hotel with 300 sixty- and seventy-somethings who are prime targets for a brokerage firm looking to peddle illiquid investments.

David Lerner Associates, a Syosset, N.Y.-based brokerage firm whose founder was barred from the securities business for a year in 2012, is still out there wooing seniors to break bread at a local hotel and hear the pitch for its investments.

I went to one of those dinners at a Marriott hotel in Trumbull, Conn. in June, and wrote about it in my column tonight for TheStreet Foundation. Prominent in the pitch that night was the firm’s non-traded real-estate investment trust, a highly illiquid investment that I sure wouldn’t want my elderly mom to buy.

What’s stunning is that investors trip over themselves to attend Lerner events despite the firm’s history. From my story:

Finra said in a complaint on May 27, 2011 that Lerner and his firm targeted many “unsophisticated and elderly” clients to sell illiquid non-traded real-estate investment trusts that were concentrated in the hotel industry. The firm used misleading marketing techniques to sell the REITs, Finra said. In the months after the complaint, Finra said Lerner sent letters to 50,000 customers in an attempt to “counter negative press.” And even those letters had “exaggerated, false or misleading statements,” according to an amended Finra complaint on Dec. 13, 2011. The $14 million in fines and restitution against the firm was Finra’s largest monetary sanction of 2012, said Michelle Ong, a Finra spokeswoman.