By Nick Paraskeva
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – A financial industry lawsuit seeking to block new U.S. rules on commodity position limits on the grounds that they lack an adequate cost-benefit analysis could cause regulators to slow their implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul and be an indicator of more such challenges. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is saying it will resist efforts to block the law. (more…)
By Emmanuel Olaoye
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – Charges that hundreds of millions of dollars are missing from the accounts of MF Global’s clients raise the question of whether powerful executives at the firm influenced the independence of internal auditors as the futures brokerage scrambled for survival.
MF Global, which collapsed over risky trades on European debt, faces a shortfall of $633 million in customer funds, the CME Group Inc. has estimated. (more…)
By Helen Parry, the views expressed are her own.
LONDON, Oct. 7 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - There are many common features in cases of rogue or unauthorised trading, including the use by ostensibly riskless arbitrage traders of fictitious trades on internal systems to mask their unhedged positions. One obvious feature that is present in many rogue trader cases has been a failure in trade confirmation systems and controls. This feature frequently appears conterminously with the fact that a trader has intimate knowledge of and/or power and influence over middle and back office systems. (more…)
By Stuart Gittleman and Brett Wolf
NEW YORK, Sept. 30 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an unexpected warning to broker-dealers to supervise trading by customers with direct market access, especially customers that trade using master- and sub-accounts.
The notice came in the first in a continuing series of risk alerts the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) staff expects to issue. The staff did not say whether OCIE found related deficiencies, or at what level, in recent exams, or in reviewing the findings of recent exams by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). (more…)
By Stuart Gittleman
NEW YORK, Sept. 22 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – In its first such action involving exchange-traded funds, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former Goldman Sachs employee with trading on confidential information about the firm’s trading strategies and plans he learned while working on its ETF desk.
An SEC official said the facts of the case may be unique. But the element of arbitrage in underlying components of the ETF echoes mutual fund trading probes in 2003 that rocked the industry. (more…)
By Erik Krusch
NEW YORK, March 23 (Westlaw Business) – Classified boards may be moving towards the endangered species list, as investors and even management are hunting them down.
Valero and Biogen Idec’s management teams, for example, are recommending that shareholders approve amendments declassifying their respective boards. Other corporations, such as Alcoa and McDonald’s Corp, however, are fighting their shareholders’ attempts to level their staggered boards. It remains to be seen how many staggered boards emerge from this proxy season unscathed. (more…)
-300x202.jpg "A U.S. flag hangs outside the New York Stock Exchange building, February 15, 2011. Deutsche Boerse will take over NYSE Euronext to create the world's largest exchange operator in a deal that dodges key questions that could yet threaten its completion. REUTERS/Joshua Lott")
Feb. 18 (Westlaw Business) The much-ballyhooed merger of the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange with that of German exchange Deutsche Borse makes two things clear – if they can make it through the thicket of global regulatory approvals and similarly convince their shareholders to tender into the offer, they’re home free. The just-filed agreement and related corporate governance documents make equally clear that “home” will not really be New York, and the NYSE Euronext will be the New York Stock Exchange no more. This may make regulatory approval that much more difficult, with U.S. regulators in particular looking at issues from antitrust to financial markets, to national security. (more…)
(Scott McCleskey is a managing editor for the ThomsonReuters Governance, Risk and Compliance unit. The views expressed are his own)
By Scott McCleskey
NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (Complinet) – With all the chest-thumping about U.S. financial reform last year, you would suppose that the regulatory authorities responsible for implementing the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act would now have the political wind at their back.
This is particularly the case given the tight deadline for most of the provisions — on or before the July 21 anniversary of the Act’s enactment. You would be wrong. Both sides of the aisle in Congress have taken or threatened steps which only serve to undermine the process of regulatory reform and leave the market with all the costs and none of the benefits of reform. (more…)
By Carlyn Kolker
NEW YORK, Feb 3 (Reuters Legal) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is cracking down on corporate disclosure of litigation costs, a Reuters Legal analysis has found. In particular, the agency is targeting banks and other institutions that have reported large settlements of financial crisis-related lawsuits that they had not disclosed in prior regulatory filings. (more…)
By Ross Kerber and Sarah N. Lynch
BOSTON/WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (Reuters) – For U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, the choice of a Goldman Sachs Group insider as her new top funds regulator could be a double-edged sword.
Eileen Rominger will have to prove she can be a neutral regulator of the industry from which she came. She spent the past 11 years at Goldman Sachs, most recently as chief investment officer of Goldman’s asset management unit before announcing her retirement in September. (more…)
