Here it is:
Thursday July 9 5:30 AM EDT
SEC prepares Wall Street charges - WSJ
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Securities and Exchange Commission has told
Wall Street securities firms it is preparing civil charges against more than 100
traders and nearly three dozen firms in connection with alleged price manipulation
on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
In conjunction with that move, the nearly three dozen Wall Street securities firms
have begun preliminary discussions with the SEC as part of an effort to reach an
industry-wide settlement over disciplinary cases stemming from trading violations
on Nasdaq, people familiar with the situation told the Journal.
The SEC's case is an outgrowth of a two-year investigation that the SEC and
Justice Department launched in 1994 into Nasdaq dealers. The probe yielded
thousands of hours of taped conversations between Nasdaq traders upon which
the SEC has built its cases, according to the newspaper.
The settlement talks, if successful, are likely to result in Wall Street paying its first
set of fines to settle regulators' allegations of trading violations on the Nasdaq
market.
Among the firms that the SEC has held settlement discussions with are Merrill
Lynch & Co., the biggest U.S. brokerage firm; Morgan Stanley Dean Witter &
Co.; PaineWebber Inc.; UBS Securities Inc., a unit of Union Bank of
Switzerland, and Charles Schwab & Co.'s Mayer & Schweitzer Inc. unit, the
paper reported. |
