Regulator Says Morgan Stanley Withheld E-Mail in Cases
175990
The NASD said Morgan Stanley made false claims that millions of e-mail messages in its possession had been lost in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
765341
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley settled allegations that they sought commitments from customers to buy shares after an initial public offering.
758316
New York prosecutors are investigating  whether Wall Street banks withheld information about the risks  stemming from subprime loan-linked investments, The New York  Times reported on Saturday.
437246
A US federal appeals court yesterday upheld a district court ruling in favor of an individual whose e-mail records were copied by government investigators from servers at Yahoo and another ISP. In so doing, the court may have prevented the government from loosely applying a key tool in its ability to obtain e-mail records without a warrant: the Stored Communications Act.
388953
(InfoWorld) - Intel may have lost some internal e-mails that the company is required to produce in aÂ lawsuitÂ brought against it by Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD), lawyers for the company said Monday. In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan Jr., one of Intel's lawyers revealed that some internal e-mails were missing, despite the company's efforts to preserve documents related to the case. "Intel is taking this matter very seriously. It very much regrets this happened," wrote Richard Horowitz, a partner at Potter, Anderson & Corroon, which represents Intel. Horowitz blamed the possible loss of e-mails on human error. For instance, when Intel employees were instructed to retain e-mails on their hard drives, some employees did not move e-mails from their sent folder to the hard drives, assuming that the company's e-mail servers would preserve them. Instead, the e-mail servers regularly delete e-mails after a certain amount of time has passed, he said. Other employees wrongly assumed that Intel's IT department was automatically saving their e-mails, while some may not have saved all of their e-mails, Horowitz said. In addition, Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case, he said. The allegedly lost e-mails were generated "primarily" after AMD filed suit against Intel on June 27, 2005, but earlier e-mails could not be ruled out as among those missing, Horowitz said. In a related filing to the court, AMD blasted Intel's apparent failure to preserve the missing e-mails. "Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed," AMD said, noting that Intel continued to allow e-mails to be deleted from its servers after the lawsuit was filed. "Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong," AMD said. AMD and Intel are scheduled to discuss the document retention failures at a status meeting on March 7. AMD demanded in its letter to the court that Intel be required to give a full accounting of its document "preservation problems" no later than March 21. AMD's 2005 suit alleges that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to bolster a monopolistic position in the PC processor market. AMD claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including DellÂ and Sony, into using only Intel processors or discontinuing use or promotion of AMD products. The alleged threats include forcing manufacturers into exclusive relationships, or offering deep discounts or marketing subsidies in exchange for discontinuing the use of AMD products. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. The suit was based in part on the findings of a Japanese anti-trust investigation, which found in March 2005 that Intel had abused its market position to restrain competition in Japan's microprocessor market. Â
734585
Morgan Stanley  on Wednesday said it will eliminate 1,000 jobs as it scales back its U.S. residential mortgage operations and closes its British residential mortgage lending business, Advantage Home Loans.
466228
Secretary of State William F. Galvin said yesterday his office has subpoenaed Morgan Stanley in an investigation into whether brokerages failed to disclose payments received from insurers to sell variable annuities.
675445
The U.S. Securities and Exchange  Commission has asked Morgan Stanley  Chief Executive John  Mack to testify regarding what role he may have played in an  insider trading case involving hedge fund Pequot Capital,  Morgan Stanley said on Friday.
762070
December 23, 2004 -- LONDON - A UK court dismissed a sex discrimination claim against Merrill Lynch brought by a former high-flying executive, who was suing the US investment bank for 7.5 million pounds ($14.61 million).
680459
Twenty-nine investment firms, including some of Wall Street's biggest names, have been fined a total $9.2 million by securities regulators who said they were late in reporting disciplinary history and other data about their brokers. The investment arms of Merrill Lynch &amp; Co. and Wachovia Corp. were barred from registering new brokers for five business days.
645484
Morgan Stanley will pay $4.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with brokerage clients who bought precious metals and paid storage fees.
554593
WASHINGTON -- The National Association of Securities Dealers censured Morgan Stanley and fined the securities firm $100,000 for failing to disclose to municipal bond buyers that the bonds could be called before their maturity dates, which could result in
351076
NASD on Monday said it fined Morgan Stanley (MWD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) $100,000 for failing to tell municipal bond investors that their bond holdings could be called before the maturity date, which could result in
180969
(InfoWorld) - E-mail messages from some of Intel's most senior executives are among those that should have been preserved but were not after the chip-maker was sued for alleged antitrust violations by Advanced Micro Devices, according to a court transcript released by AMD. IntelÂ revealed last weekÂ that some internal e-mails that may be important to the case were missing as a result of errors. The transcript, from a status conference on March 7, indicates that Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and President and CEO Paul Otellini were among those not in compliance with the company's document retention policies. The executives apparently deleted the e-mail messages, including some to Intel's largest customers, because they were under the false impression that Intel was automatically backing up their e-mail, according to the transcript. "But the last category that I am very worried about is the senior management -- and I'm talking executive level Barrett and Otellini," said AMD attorney Linda Smith, according to the transcript. "This is the absolute top level. And these are the folks that, even if there's only a two-, three-, four-month gap, they're the major players who are communicating with the heads of other companies." E-mail messages from several hundred Intel employees have been requested by lawyers for AMD. Some employee e-mail was lost because workers failed to move messages from their "sent" folder into other folders and it was automatically deleted, while others were lost because Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case. Intel representatives in London declined to comment. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told the Wall Street Journal that the missing information represents "a small proportion of the tens of millions of pages of documents" that Intel will provide in the case. "There is no evidence whatsoever that any relevant e-mails or documents have been lost," he told the Journal. AMD filed its lawsuit against Intel and its Japanese subsidiary, Intel KK, in 2005, alleging that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to support its monopoly in the PC processor market. The lawsuit claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including Dell and Sony, into using only Intel processors and stopping the promotion of AMD products. Intel denies the charges. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. Â
396370
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has suspended trading for 10 days on shares of 35 companies that it said have been the subject of repeated "pump-and-dump" spam campaigns.
380824
InfoWorld - The U.K.&#39;s financial services regulator has levied a heavy fine against the nation&#39;s largest building society over a stolen laptop containing confidential customer information.
732555
(InfoWorld) - The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam. Last May the Aurora, Colorado, law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something. What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide. On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: the Barracuda Networks Inc. appliance began blocking e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit. Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter. What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms. "This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, chief technology officer with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false positives in the anti-spam world to misidentify a crucial piece of correspondence." Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner said. Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. This charge has been led by the federal court system, which uses an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF), in nearly 200 courts across the country. All federal bankruptcy and district courts use CM/ECF and soon it will be standard in the appellate courts, according to Richard Carelli, a spokesman with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said. Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail. In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received." The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue. But despite the persistence of spammers, Balasubramani doesn't think that the CM/ECF system is really in any trouble. "I don't think the scourge of spam is going to hurt the viability of CM/ECF," he said. "I see this decision as a little bit of an aberration." Kesner, who was a lawyer before taking over the CTO job at Fenwick & West , points out that missed appointments happen when parties are notified by postal mail as well. He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue. His advice for legal IT staff? "You test like crazy," he said. "And then you pray and genuflect."