JP Morgan 2 Billion Trading Loss

JP Morgan Reveals 2 Billion Trading Loss. Jake Zamansky is interviewed by CNBC.

****

Posted in SEC News, Securities Law, Securities News | No Comments »

Zamansky Investigates Oppenheimer’s Global Resource Private Equity Fund

Zamansky & Associates LLC (”Zamansky”) announces that it is investigating Oppenheimer Holdings Inc. (”Oppenheimer”)(NYSE: OPY) over the sales and valuation of its Oppenheimer Global Resource Private Equity Fund L.P. (the “Global Resources Fund”).  The Global Resources Fund was a fund of funds launched by Oppenheimer in April 2008, and has raised over $200 million from investors.

On March 6, 2012, in its annual report, Oppenheimer disclosed that it received notice from the United States Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts seeking information on its valuation of a “single portfolio holding” of the Fund during 2009.  In October 2011, months earlier, the Securities and Exchange Commission (”SEC”) and Attorney General of Massachusetts sought documents and obtained on-the-record testimony from members of Oppenheimer’s private equity group and supervisors.

According to public news reports, the investigation of Oppenheimer centers around its over-valuation of a holding for the Fund.  The over-valuation turned the Fund’s loss of 6.3%  into internal returns of 38%.  Oppenheimer marketed and sold the Fund based on false or inflated performance figures and, as a result, raised an additional $55 million from investors for the Fund.  Often, this activity supports legal claims of fraud, misrepresentation, material omission, breach of fiduciary duty, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract.

If you were an investor in Oppenheimer’s Global Resources Fund, and wish to discuss your rights, please contact Securities Attorney Jake Zamansky at (212) 742-1414.

Posted in Openheimer, Securities Law | No Comments »

Alert for Lehman 100% Principal Protection Note Holders

NEW YORK-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Zamansky & Associates advises all holders of Lehman Brothers 100% Principal Protection Notes (including those sold by UBS) that they should carefully guard their legal rights in light of recent developments.

It was just announced that Lehman was emerging from bankruptcy proceedings. Debt holders are scheduled to begin receiving partial payments in April 2012. Those payments will amount to only a small fraction of investors’ losses.

Zamansky & Associates has successfully represented dozens of investors who purchased Lehman Principal Protection Notes from UBS in FINRA arbitration cases. The firm won the first of these cases to go to FINRA arbitration in 2009 and has also won the largest arbitration award to date.

What You May Do

If you would like to discuss your legal rights and how you can recover your losses, you may, without obligation or cost to you, email jake@zamansky.comor call the law firm at (212) 742-1414.

About Zamansky & Associates

Zamansky & Associates is one of the leading law firms specializing in securities fraud and financial services arbitration and class action litigation. We represent both individual and institutional investors. Our practice is nationally recognized for our ability to aggressively prosecute cases and recover losses.

If you have suffered losses as a result of an investment in Lehman notes, please contact us by emailing jake@zamansky.com or calling (212) 742-1414.

Posted in Lehman Brothers Stock | No Comments »

The New Gordon Gekko: Greed is Bad

Articles from top Securities Lawyer Jake Zamansky:

Investors, take heart: one of the all-time Bad Boys of Wall Street, mean and greedy Gordon Gekko, has turned over a new leaf.

We all remember Gordon Gekko, the conniving trader from the terrific Oliver Stone movie “Wall Street.” Set in the booming 1980s, the film’s most memorable line is delivered by a slick-haired Michael Douglas, who portrayed Gekko as a delightful creep of a trader with absolutely no morals.

“The point is… that greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” Gekko famously said. “Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

Traders and investment bankers cheered at that line. In fact, some of the old-timers love to recite that line to this day.

Now, Michael Douglas is calling this ethic a bunch of bunk. In a public service announcement that takes on insider trading, the very crime for which the fictional Mr. Gekko did hard time, Mr. Douglas says greed is bad.

“I’m Michael Douglas,” the message begins. “In the movie ‘Wall Street,’ I play Gordon Gekko… The movie was fiction, but the problem is real… To report insider trading, contact your local FBI office.”

The ad is a bit of Madison-Avenue populism to draw focus to the FBI’s far-reaching and historic probe of insider trading on Wall Street.

And it worked. Then-and-now portraits of Mr. Douglas as Gordon Gekkodominated the front page of Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.

The FBI is right to draw attention to its solid work in this arena. So far, federal prosecutors have charged 66 individuals at hedge funds and other companies with insider trading since 2009 and won 57 guilty pleas or jury convictions, according to the report by Jenny Strasburg and Reed Albergotti in Tuesday’s Journal.

And the FBI is not giving up the chase anytime soon. In fact, the FBI is expanding its investigation, which has already shaken up Wall Street. According to the Journal, federal authorities are looking to build insider trading cases against almost 120 individuals on and off the Street.

Punctuating that point, today’s Journal brings word that the FBI and federal prosecutors are “investigating whether a top Goldman Sachs manager “passed inside information about technology stocks to the firm’s hedge-fund clients.” According to reporters Susan Pulliam and Michael Rothfeld, they are focused on a senior salesman, David Loeb, “who acts as a middleman” between the rarified firm and its institutional clients. Apparently, the hits just keep coming for Goldman, whose former director Rajat Gupta, is slated for a May trial on insider-trading charges that he passed key secret information along to another of the firm’s hedge-fund clients, the now-convicted Raj Rajaratnam, during the darkest days of the 2008 financial crisis.

Of course, not everyone is a fan of the transformation.

The New York Post on Tuesday called Gekko/Douglas a Wall Street turncoat for having the nerve to speak the truth about the culture of greed that fueled the housing bubble that led to the collapse of the world’s financial institutions in 2008. “‘Gekko’ turns rat for FBI’s fraud-buster ad,” the Post declares in its headline. “Douglas on other side of ‘Street.’”

But, according to people close to Mr. Douglas, the need to reverse the “Greed is Good” mantra is quite real. Here are a couple of eye-opening paragraphs from the WSJ story:

“While filming the one-minute television spot at the Trump International Hotel, (FBI agent David Chaves) said Mr. Douglas told him he often gets stopped in the street by Wall Street professionals who admire the conniving Mr. Gekko,” the Journal reported.

“Mr. Chaves said that Mr. Douglas was dismayed. ‘He’s like ‘where are the values? What are people thinking when I’m hailed as a hero in that role?’”

Indeed, Mr. Douglas: where are the values? We’ve been asking that same question for years.

Disclosure: Zamansky & Associates are securities attorneys representing investors in arbitration and federal and state litigation against hedge funds and financial institutions including Goldman Sachs.

Read article by Securities Lawyer Jake Zamansky on Forbes.com

Posted in SECURITIES ATTORNEYS, Securities Law | No Comments »

Harbinger Class Action Lawsuit

Zamansky & Associates today filed a lawsuit against Philip A. Falcone and his Harbinger hedge fund on behalf of the fund’s limited partners who held their interests as of December 31, 2011.

* View Complaint *

The Complaint alleges that the defendants breached contractual and fiduciary duties to the limited partners and made false and misleading statements in the course of soliciting investments in the fund and communicating with the limited partners.

The offering memorandum describes an investment strategy starkly different than the one Falcone actually pursued. Instead of following the strategy he had outlined, Falcone used the limited partners’ funds to buy a controlling stake in SkyTerra, later renamed LightSquared. When Harbinger took its controlling stake, LightSquared was an enormously risky company whose very existence depended on receiving an FCC license to build a vast proposed wireless network.

The military, the commercial aviation industry, agricultural manufacturers and others raised vocal objections. Once numerous tests concluded that the proposed network would severely disrupt the GPS satellites so central to military activities, aviation and farming, the FCC announced that it would not give LightSquared permission to move ahead with its planned network.

The limited partners were misled into investing in the fund and holding their positions, and once they learned the truth about the fund’s stake in LightSquared, it was too late to redeem their interests. As a result, they have suffered enormous losses.

The SEC is actively investigating whether Harbinger improperly allowed Goldman Sachs to redeem its investment while requiring the other limited partners to stay in.

Zamansky & Associates LLC, 50 Broadway, 32^nd Floor, New York, NY, and their co-counsel, Girard Gibbs, LLP of San Francisco, filed the case. The case, Schad v. Harbinger Capital Partners LLC et al., No. 12-civ-1244, was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan.

Posted in Class Action Lawsuits, Harbinger Capital, LightSquared | No Comments »

SEC Compliance Seminar Scheduled for Jan. 31st

Entering a year of intensifying scrutiny on illegal tips on Wall Street amid implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has scheduled its annual compliance outreach seminar Jan. 31.

The free webinar is intended to help chief compliance officers and other business leaders minimize the odds of employees sharing or benefiting from insider trades following tips.

In the past few years, U.S. and New York prosecutors have zeroed in on so-called expert networks, essentially rings in which well-placed executives share tips that get disbursed to a wider range of traders.

In sentencing a California hedge fund consultant last month, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said insider trading appears to be on the rise despite jail terms and monetary fines for perpetrators. Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted of leading the largest-ever insider trading ring via his Galleon Group hedge fund, began serving an 11-year prison sentence in a Massachusetts federal prison.

Authorities are catching up. In December, a Bloomberg News report detailed a federal probe called “Perfect Hedge,” a reference to investigators’ term for hedge fund managers receiving advance information on moves that swing markets, allowing them to buy or sell securities and maximize profits.

Multiple people who live in Fairfield County or worked for companies here have received jail terms for profiting on insider tips.

In July, a judge froze the assets of three Swiss companies after they bought more than a million shares of Norwalk-based Arch Chemicals Inc. on the eve of an announcement the company would be acquired by Lonza Group Ltd., which is based in Switzerland.

The smallest money managers today are spending 8 percent of their budget on compliance, according to a March 2010 survey co-sponsored by Greenwich-based Financial Tracking Technologies L.L.C. and the compliance trade news publisher IA Watch, with the average cost at 6 percent across all companies.

Greenwich-based Financial Tracking Technologies (FTT) is among the companies that sell software designed to raise the red flag on insider trading.

Founded in 1999 by Anthony Turner, FTT sells a software module that tracks news and other publicly disclosed information on companies, then analyzes trades made by an employee to see if they occur prior to the news going public.

By allowing companies to proactively address such scenarios and take action, FTT says it can help companies hedge their exposure to illicit trading activity.

Government regulators number among FTT’s customer base, according to the company, as well as a third of the largest publicly traded money managers and insurers.

FTT has numerous other software modules, including those to track portfolio pumping, account dumping, and money laundering; and one allowing companies to track “pay to play” schemes involving political contributions by their employees.

Source

Posted in Insider Trading, SEC News | No Comments »

SEC Changees ‘Confirm Nor Deny’ Policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday that it was making a major change in how it settles some securities fraud cases, telling companies that they will no longer be allowed to neither admit nor deny the commission’s civil charges when, at the same time, they admit to or have been convicted of criminal violations.

The change will also apply to cases where a company enters an agreement with criminal authorities to defer prosecution or to not prosecute as part of a settlement.

Robert Khuzami, the director of enforcement at the S.E.C., said the agency would continue to use the “neither admit nor deny” settlement process when it alone reaches a deal with a company in a case of civil securities law violations. Those types of cases make up a large majority of its settlements.

The S.E.C. has been sharply criticized, in federal court and on Capitol Hill, for allowing companies to repeatedly settle fraud cases without admitting or denying the charges. Until last week, that policy has been applied even when a company acknowledges the same conduct to another government agency, often the Justice Department.

For example, the S.E.C. and the Justice Department announced on the same day last month that Wachovia bank would pay $148 million to settle charges that the bank reaped millions of dollars in profits by rigging bids in the municipal securities market, one of several such settlements announced last year by the two agencies.

In the Justice Department settlement, Wachovia said it “admits, acknowledges and accepts responsibility for” manipulating the bidding process in the sale of derivatives on tax-exempt bonds to institutional investors like cities, hospitals and pension plans over a six-year period ending in 2004.

But in fashioning a settlement with the S.E.C. based on the same facts, Wachovia agreed to settle the charges “without admitting or denying the allegations.” Wachovia is now part of Wells Fargo.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in SEC News | No Comments »

Zamansky Files Class Action Lawsuit on Behalf of MF Global Employees

Zamansky & Associates has filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of MF Global employees who purchased MF Global shares .

View Class Action Complaint Here

The suit is brought against the firm’s former Chief Executive Jon Corzine, other senior executives and directors on behalf of current and former employees who acquired stock in the company while Corzine led the firm. The complaint alleges that the defendants provided false information regarding the company’s financial condition and made statements that artificially inflated the stock price.

Plaintiffs are seeking class action status for all employees who acquired MF Global shares between May 20, 2010 and Nov. 3, 2011 through company-supported plans. Describing the case theory, Jacob Zamansky said, “Jon Corzine and the board breached their fiduciary duty to their employees and destroyed their careers and retirement savings.” At the time of the company’s bankruptcy Oct. 31, the firm had close to 2,900 employees.

Zamansky & Associates is working with co-counsel Girard Gibbs LLP on this matter.

Source: NY Securities Lawyer

Posted in Class Action Lawsuits | No Comments »

JinkoSolar Class Action

Zamansky & Associates LLC and Sianni & Straite LLP Announce Class Action Lawsuit Against JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd., Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC and Other Related Defendants

October 11, 2011 (New York) - View Complaint

Notice is hereby given that a class action lawsuit has been filed today, October 11, 2011 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by an investor individually and on behalf of all other investors who purchased or otherwise acquired JinkoSolar New York Stock Exchange-traded American Depositary Shares [NYSE: JKS], CUSIP 47759T100, between May 13, 2010 and September 21, 2011 (the “Class Period”). The Class Action Complaint alleges that JinkoSolar and certain of its officers and/or directors have violated sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Sections 11, 12(a)(2) and 15 of the Securities Act of 1933, and includes a claim for equitable assessment of attorneys’ fees.  The Complaint also asserts Section 11 and 12(a)(2) claims against lead underwriter Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC and other investment banks that underwrote JinkoSolar’s May 13, 2010 IPO.

A copy of the Class Action Complaint filed in this action can be viewed on the firms’ websites at www.zamansky.com or www.siannistraite.com.

Posted in Class Action Lawsuits | No Comments »

Should Corporate Political Spending Be Disclosed?

Investors are highly interested in information regarding corporate political spending, says Hillary Sale, JD, securities and corporate governance expert and the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The SEC should address the need for transparency in political spending to better inform shareholders and allow them to protect themselves from hidden political agendas in corporate campaign spending,” she says.

Sale has written extensively on securities and corporate governance matters, including redesigning the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), independent directors as securities monitors, derivative litigation, and corporate law and governance.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »