The 9th Circuit sided with the Securities Exchange Commission in an action against Heart Tronics Inc. and attorney Mitchell Stein, who fraudulently inflated the company’s stock price while working as its outside counsel.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission claimed victory in the 9th Circuit after an appellate panel affirmed a judgment against a financial planning corporation for selling unregistered securities, but a named defendant’s death during the appeal spared his estate of civil penalties.
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(CN) – A Lehman Brothers employee who claims she was fired for whistleblower violations after she reported securities violations missed her filing deadline and couldn’t bring her lawsuit in federal court, a First Circuit panel held.
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(CN) – A federal judge in Delaware granted Twitter a motion to stay a consolidated shareholder derivative action, which accuses the company’s directors of concealing information about sluggish growth.
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(CN) – A South Carolina federal judge refused to dismiss a shareholder derivative complaint against SCANA Corporation’s board of directors over the abandonment of two nuclear reactors that allegedly cost the company billions of dollars.
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(CN) – A proposed class action against Raymond James & Associates claiming the company kept profits from processing fees is not precluded by federal law, the 11th Circuit ruled.
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(CN) – An appellate panel affirmed the dismissal of three proposed class actions against brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, where investors claimed the company wrongly directed client orders to trading venues that paid “kickbacks.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission did not have jurisdiction over a petition by a number of securities firms claiming the Chicago Board Options Exchange and Nasdaq mischarged them millions of dollars, the Seventh Circuit ruled.
Read moreA federal judge declined to dismiss an FDIC lawsuit seeking $1.12 billion from Bank of America for allegedly underpaying what it owed for deposit insurance.
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The Fifth Circuit vacated the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule in a divided decision, dealing a major blow to the Obama administration’s efforts to increase protections for investors.
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A Bernie Madoff creditor cannot ditch the bankruptcy process to directly sue UBS for establishing feeder funds that helped Madoff defraud investors of billions, the Second Circuit ruled.
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Shareholders can sue Community Health Systems for allegedly hiding a major driver of its profitability – Medicare fraud – which a competitor revealed in a 2011 lawsuit, the Sixth Circuit ruled.
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Energy Transfer Equity is not entitled to a $1.5 billion termination fee after scuttling a $33 billion merger with Williams Cos., the Delaware Chancery Court ruled.
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A federal judge in Delaware dismissed a shareholder action challenging the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s authority to divert Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s future profits to the U.S. Treasury as a condition of the mortgage giants’ $188 billion bailout during the 2008 financial crisis.
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The Delaware Chancery Court dismissed a shareholder derivative lawsuit that challenged Viacom’s payment of $13 million in bonus money and salary to founder and longtime chairman Sumner Redstone.
Read moreA former head of currency trading at HSBC is facing extradition from London to the United States, where federal prosecutors have charged him with fraud for alleged front-running trades executed in advance of a client’s multibillion-dollar currency conversion.
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A divided Fifth Circuit panel upheld a lifetime ban on a penny stock trader for the purchase and resale of $7.7 million worth of unregistered securities.
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A federal judge dismissed an investor suit accusing Credit Suisse, RBS, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks of manipulating the Swiss franc Libor rate.
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(CN) – Likening himself to the Lady of Shalott character confined to a castle tower in an 1830s poem, Delaware Vice Chancellor Samuel Glasscock dismissed a shareholder class action over aerospace company Kreisler Manufacturing’s merger, notwithstanding his constrained view of the facts around the deal. Glasscock found plaintiff Alan Kahn had failed to show that the company’s directors acted in bad faith when negotiating the company’s merger with private equity group Arlington Capital Partners.
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