Press Room

A recent report shows one out of five older Americans is a financial swindle victim. BNN speaks to Tom Ajamie, founder and managing partner, Ajamie LLP, about his new book, "Financial Serial Killers," for an inside look at the complex strategies financial advisers, insurance agents, and even family members employ to fleece hapless individuals, and how you can protect yourself from being swindled.

John Clay discusses the formation of “perfect” conditions for litigation in the Gulf Coast region following the Macondo oil spill.  The BP/Deepwater Horizon disaster may lead to years of litigation, both for immediate damage from the spill and for growing economic consequences that continue to flow from the disruption of offshore drilling operations in the Gulf.

There's an important if unpalatable message for financial advisers in a new arbitration ruling: A mistake is a mistake, even when an adviser's company signs off on it.

A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority panel showed little sympathy for two advisers who sought $232 million in damages from Citigroup Global Markets Inc., the retail brokerage unit of Citigroup (C). The two were blamed for excessive trading fees the brokerage charged to a multibillion-dollar trust account they oversaw from 2005 to 2007.

Alan J. Kirman and Peter R. Dunn, who worked in a Boca Raton, Fla.-based branch office, didn't dispute that the fees exceeded company guidelines for the account, which was taking in billions of dollars from the watershed Tobacco Trust Settlement of 1998. According to documents in a related court case, they said the lapse wasn't their fault: Citigroup never showed them the fee schedule, they said, and all their trades and supporting documents were reviewed by the company's legal department, compliance officers and other corporate management.

They sought both compensatory and punitive damages, but their argument was rejected by the panel. It also rings hollow with some lawyers.

Not that Citigroup's compliance department comes off looking good, after allegedly letting the fee discrepancy slip through for as long as two years. "It sounds very strange that it took so long for compliance to find this problem for such a large account," says Tom Ajamie, a securities lawyer in Houston, Texas.

BP Plc faces more than 300 lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in potential claims as damage from the worst oil spill in U.S. history ripples through the nation's Gulf Coast economy.

Lawyers will ask a panel of federal judges in Boise, Idaho, on July 29 to consolidate the cases into two multidistrict litigations, or MDLs, to streamline pretrial rulings, evidence-gathering and organization.

One MDL would cover economic loss and environmental damage claims in a dozen states. The other MDL will cover lawsuits by investors in BP U.S. shares who claim the company's officers failed to disclose safety problems, artificially inflating stock value, or that management failures led to the spill.

This MDL might not cover the growing number of lawsuits by BP's U.S. workers claiming the company breached its duty to them in managing the employee savings plan, said attorney Thomas Ajamie in Houston. These lawsuits claim BP and retirement savings plan managers knew or should have know that investing in the oil company was imprudent.

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Proper precautions can help a fleet survive a potential lawsuit should an employee become entangled in an accident claim.

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