Wall Street Settlement. Senators are scrutinizing the government’s $1.4 billion settlement with 10 major investment firms to determine whether ordinary investors will benefit and Wall Street’s culture will fundamentally change.
Federal and state regulators have exposed that culture in an investigation that found analysts misled investors with stock picks designed to win the firms investment-banking business from the companies issuing the stock.
Dozens of e-mail excerpts made public last week, included in lawsuits filed against the firms by the Securities and Exchange Commission, portray an industry wide pattern of abuse, financial incentives and pressures that sometimes led analysts to publish falsely rosy stock reports.
SEC Chairman William Donaldson and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer were scheduled to testify about the settlement Wednesday before the Senate Banking Committee.
Seeking to restore investor confidence, the SEC and state and market regulators are forcing the firms to cut the ties between analysts’ research and investment banking, pay a total of $432.5 million for independent stock research for their customers, and fund an $80 million investor education program.
A fund of $387.5 million will be set up to compensate customers of the 10 firms; $487.5 million in fines will go to states according to their population.
The claims by investors who believe they were cheated are expected to surpass that amount by far. Just how and to whom the investor restitution fund will be parceled out is unclear, and an administrator to oversee the process must first be named.
Already, investor advocates and lawmakers have criticized the states for largely planning to use the money for things like road improvement and school construction, while only a few will channel it to aggrieved investors.
The firms including Merrill Lynch, Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney and J.P. Morgan Chase neither admitted to nor denied the regulators’ allegations that they deceived investors.
enforcement action against executives
Some senators want to know why top executives of the brokerage firms weren’t held to account in the settlement for allegedly failing to properly supervise their employees. The SEC has held open the possibility of future enforcement action against executives of firms.
Under the settlement, the firms will not be able to deduct any of the payments of fines against their taxes. But because that prohibition does not extend to the firms’ payments to compensate investors or pay for independent research or investor education, some lawmakers have criticized the settlement.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, already has proposed legislation to put more restrictions on the firms’ ability to deduct payments against their taxes so that U.S. taxpayers won’t have to pick up part of the tab.
Similarly, the firms promised in the settlement not to seek insurance reimbursement for fines they paid, but it’s not clear whether they’ll try to deduct more than $900 million in other payments related to the pact. The accord does not clearly address whether millions of dollars paid toward the restitution fund, independent research and investor education may be recovered.
Regulators may have intentionally left these details up to state courts, which handle most insurance disputes. If the firms do try to deduct parts of their payments, their insurers are likely to balk, experts say.
The other seven firms who took part in the settlement are Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and UBS Warburg (now UBS Paine Webber).
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