Finra arbitration panel orders UBS to pay for damages over Puerto Rico bond losses

UBS Group AG's wealth management business for the Americas must pay more than $470,000 to three investors who claimed damages because their accounts were over-concentrated in Puerto Rico bonds that plunged in value, according to the Financial Industry Regulation Authority Inc.Obdulio Melendez Ramos, Ramon Velez Garcia and Carlos L. Merced had been seeking as much as $570,243 for damages, alleging fraud and negligent supervision, according to the Finra arbitration award document dated March 24. Their claims were filed in October 2014."Although the arbitrators awarded less than the full damages the claimants requested, UBS is disappointed with the decision to award any damages, with which we respectfully disagree," Gregg Rosenberg, a spokesman for UBS, said in an emailed statement.

"The decision in this case was based on the facts and circumstances particular to these particular claimants, and is not indicative of how other panels may rule with regard to other customers who invested in similar products," he said.Damages tied to Puerto Rico's distressed debt were among the litigation matters outlined in the Swiss bank's financial supplement for its fourth-quarter earnings results released in early February. The supplement showed that since August 2013, declines in the price of Puerto Rico municipal bonds and related funds managed and distributed by UBS have led to regulatory inquiries, customer complaints and arbitrations, with claimed damages totaling $1.5 billion. About $284 million of claims were resolved through settlements or arbitration, according to the supplement.The oil bust could leave a similarly long wake of arbitration awards in the brokerage industry, as a wave of claims are expected to be filed this year with Finra. Investors have begun seeking damages based on allegations that their brokers put too much of their money in energy investments, which cratered following crude's plunge in the second half of 2014.

By Christine Idzelis

Finra arbitration panel orders UBS to pay for damages over Puerto Rico bond losses

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IMF Executive Board Discusses the First Assessment of Eligible Countries under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

On December 21, 2005 the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established the list of countries that qualify for debt relief from the Fund under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). Debt relief delivery, which could start as soon as January 3, 2005, is now conditional on getting the consents of all the contributors to the Subsidy Account of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) Trust, whose contributions help finance the Initiative. The MDRI will deliver debt relief from the Fund to qualifying members countries with an annual per capita income at or below US$380, and to countries above the threshold that have reached the completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The implementation of the MDRI will reduce the external debt burden of a number of the world's poorest countries and will provide additional resources to help them reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Background The Executive Board appro...
Read more

Oil’s chaotic collapse deepens; stocks drop worldwide

Image
NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand...
Read more

Mapping Extreme Poverty Around the World A new report from the

Image
A new report from the  World Bank  just landed, finding that a record low of 10% of humanity now live in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2013. But poverty rates aren’t anywhere close to equal between continents or even countries, as our new series of maps clearly demonstrates. The World Bank provides an in-depth explanation for its methodology, which you can find in Appendix A of the full report  here . We focused on the percentage of people in each country living below what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty, or $1.90/day. We’ll let the researchers defend this definition on their own, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. It can be extraordinarily difficult to collect reliable data from so many countries on a regular basis, and in fact we used the latest year in which numbers were available whenever possible. For example, in some of these maps we compare 2011 figures against 2015. In short, our maps provide the clearest possible apples-to-apples compa...
Read more