FYI...Money managers worry about insider trading - poll
Mohan: Do you think some of these Fund Managers are running loose with a little too much freedom <GG>...Check this out...
<<Monday June 14, 6:01 pm EST
NEW YORK, June 14 (Reuters) - Mutual fund executives worry that employees could cross ethical and legal boundaries by personal trading, but many have no clear policies to prevent it, according to a survey released on Monday.
Nearly three-quarters of some 65 mutual fund and money managers polled said personal trading, insider trading and fraudulent reporting were areas of ''high concern,'' according to the survey done by accountancy and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. About two-thirds feared conflicts of interest, the survey said.
Mutual fund managers each day buy and sell stocks worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes influencing the price of a security. Employees could potentially make money by buying or selling stocks for their personal accounts through knowledge of these transactions.
Most portfolio managers who trade for their own account keep to self-imposed industry guidelines that prohibit using insider information or fund activity for personal benefit, mutual fund sources have told Reuters in the past. Some isolated scandals, however, have highlighted concerns over wether the industry does enough to prevent from using their funds' buying power to enrich themselves.
''While in each case the potential risk of liability arising from such activities is considerable, almost a third of the survey respondents said their organizations do not have a formal remediation and retribution process and another 16 percent were unsure if such a process even existed,'' said a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, Andrew Nolan, in a statement.
Almost two-thirds of the 65 mutual fund executives, who oversaw a combined total of more than $1 trillion in assets, said their firms periodically reviewed their ethics programs. In general, however, the reviews were more detective, through audits, than preventive, the survey said.>> |
