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Technology Stocks : TTRE: TTR Technologies, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (47)	12/24/2001 7:27:37 PM
From: blebovits	Respond to of 120

Top Financial News 12/24 15:44 NYSE Fines Ex-Lehman, PaineWebber Broker $429 Mln for Fraud By Monique Wise New York, Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- A New York Stock Exchange panel fined a former Lehman Brothers Inc. and PaineWebber Inc. broker $429 million -- the largest fine ever against a broker -- for allegedly buying worthless stocks on his customers' behalf in exchange for kickbacks. The three-person panel said that between 1992 and 1998 Enrique Ernesto Perusquia used his clients' accounts to invest in stock of companies that were nearly bankrupt, and then falsified his customers' brokerage account statements to hide the fraud. Perusquia, who worked at Lehman Brothers' Manhattan office and PaineWebber's Manhattan and San Francisco offices, lost close to $100 million belonging to 12 families, including that of Mexican commercial real estate developer Francisco Lerma, according to Thomas Ajamie, a lawyer at Schirrmeister Ajamie LLP in Houston, which represented the investors. The families originally invested $100 million. ``The New York Stock Exchange was making a statement with the award,'' which included about $208.7 million in punitive damages, said Ajamie. Punitive damages are those above and beyond the amount lost by investors. In addition to punitive damages, the panel also fined Perusquia $208.7 million in actual damages and $11 million in attorneys' fees, according to the NYSE award document dated Nov. 28, 2001. Ajamie said he didn't think the $429 million could be recovered from Perusquia. ``Perusquia has money, in the tens of millions, not in the hundreds of millions,'' said Ajamie. Earlier this year, Ajamie's clients settled with PaineWebber, now owed by Swiss Bank UBS AG, Lehman Brothers Inc. and ChaseManhattan Bank, which cleared the trades for the two firms, Ajamie said. While Ajamie declined to disclose the settlement amount he said it enabled his clients to recover much of what they had initially invested. Perusquia, who lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with an unpublished telephone number, wasn't available for comment. His lawyer's office in San Francisco, Cooper White & Cooper LLP, was closed on Dec. 24. Perusquia started working at Lehman Brothers in 1989, where he stayed until the summer of 1994, when he moved to PaineWebber's Avenue of the America's office in Manhattan, said Ajamie.