Regulatory Violations

February 12, 2021

Registered investment advisor and broker-dealer Winslow, Evans & Crocker, Inc. will pay $1.9 million in disgorgement, interest, and penalties to resolve allegations regarding its mutual fund share class and cash sweep selection practices.  Winslow allegedly recommended mutual fund share classes and money market funds to its customers without adequately disclosing that it received 12b-1 fees and revenue-sharing payments in connection with those shares and funds, when lower-cost share classes and options were available.  SEC

ITG - Securities Fraud violations (Multi-Millions)

Constantine Cannon represented a whistleblower in a submission under the SEC Whistleblower Program relating to brokerage firm ITG's alleged violations of the firm’s dark pool, POSIT.  In May 2021, the SEC awarded our client 30% of the government's recovery, the maximum amount allowed under the program.  Read more -- CC

December 17, 2020

Robinhood Financial LLC will pay $65 million to resolve an SEC investigation into its disclosures regarding the firm’s receipt of "payment for order flow" – payments from trading firms for routing customer orders to them – as well as its alleged failure to secure best execution on customer orders.  According to the SEC, while Robinhood advertised to customers that trades were "commission-free," it steered customer orders to trading firms that paid Robinhood for order flow but provided inferior trade prices to Robinhood customers, thereby misrepresenting the true cost of trades.  SEC; See 2021 FINRA penalty

December 9, 2020

ICE Data Pricing & Reference Data LLC agreed to pay $8 million to resolve charges that between 2015 and 2020 it failed to take adequate steps to ensure the accuracy of securities pricing data it supplied to clients, including by relying on single broker quotes which did not reasonably reflect the value of certain securities.  This conduct affected the prices ICE Data PRD provided for more than 40,000 fixed-income securities. SEC

October 21, 2020

Cryptocurrency issuer Kik Interactive Inc. will pay a $5 million penalty in a consent judgment resolving claims by the SEC that Kik’s unregistered offering of digital “Kin” tokens in 2017 violated U.S. securities laws.  The consent judgment finds that Kin tokens were investment contracts and the offering did not qualify for any exemption from registration requirements.  Kik sold the tokens through both public and private sales; the court found that the sales were a single integrated offering.   SEC

October 15, 2020

Energy company Andeavor LLC will pay a $20 million penalty to resolve allegations that, while the company was in merger discussions with Marathon Petroleum  Corp. in 2018, it implemented a stock buyback plan without taking adequate compliance steps, including an evaluation of whether the company was in possession of material non-public information about corporate developments.  The Marathon merger, which valued Andeavor at over $150 per share, was announced one month after Andeavor completed the buyback at an average price of $97 per share.  SEC

September 30, 2020

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC will pay a total of $10 million in civil monetary penalties to the SEC and CFTC.  In an agreement with the SEC, the company will pay a $5 million civil monetary penalty arising from charges that the firm violated the short sale procedures of Regulation SHO. Specifically, Morgan Stanley improperly used “long” and “short” aggregation units when it hedged synthetic exposure to swaps by purchasing or selling the securities referenced in the swaps.  The aggregation units were not independent and did not have separate trading strategies.  As a result, Morgan Stanley should have netted the long and short positions of both units together or across the entire broker-dealer and marked the orders as long or short based on that netting. The CFTC, which also imposed a $5 million penalty, charged that Morgan Stanley failed to comply with swap data reporting obligations, inaccurately reporting swap data for approximately three million swaps. SEC; CFTC

September 28, 2020

Citibank N.A. and its related entities Citigroup Energy Inc. and Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. will pay a $4.5 million penalty for maintaining an inadequate telephone audio recording and preservation system.  According to the charges, Citibank internal reporting described the audio preservation system as having a flaw that was a “ticking time bomb” that could lead to the deletion of audio recordings.  When Citibank was required to produce recordings in response to a CFTC subpoena, the company disclosed that millions of audio files for 982 users had been deleted as a result of the flaw.  CFTC

September 15, 2020

Online gaming and gambling platform Unikm, Inc. agreed to pay a $6.1 million penalty to resolve allegations that the company unlawfully sold unregistered securities in its initial coin offering of “UnikoinGold” (UKG) tokens.  The recovered funds will be used to repay injured investors.  SEC