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Strategies & Market Trends : Can you beat 50% per month? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Smiling Bob who wrote (5411)	1/9/2003 2:23:51 PM
From: Smiling Bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19256

This won't help the stocks much See bold(s) Wall Street probe findings expected within weeks Thursday January 9, 1:39 pm ET By Brian Kelleher NEW YORK, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Disgruntled investors suing Wall Street firms over bad stock picks will soon get a windfall, as state regulators including New York's Eliot Spitzer will likely release the findings of probes into Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C - News) and other banks by the end of the month. ADVERTISEMENT Officials for New York, Massachusetts and Washington are expected to present evidence on Citigroup's Salomon Smith Barney unit, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MWD - News), Credit Suisse First Boston and US Bancorp (NYSE:USB - News) unit Piper Jaffray before February, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The states' evidence -- said to include documents, e-mails and interviews -- comes from the broad probe into Wall Street business practices that resulted in last month's landmark $1.4 billion settlement with 11 banks. A finalized court settlement is expected near the end of January, as well as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approval, sources have said. Investors have filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits accusing stock analysts of touting companies merely to win investment banking business. High-profile analysts like former Salomon Smith Barney telecom guru Jack Grubman and former Merrill Lynch & Co. (NYSE:MER - News) dot-com analyst Henry Blodget have been named in many suits. EVIDENCE FOR INVESTORS Ten firms, including Salomon, CSFB, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS - News) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MWD - News) agreed to pay $925 million in fines and restitution as part of the Dec. 20 settlement. The list of firms -- which eventually included Piper -- neither denied nor admitted wrongdoing, which somewhat protects them against investor lawsuits. Yet armed with evidence from the probes, investors have a unique advantage they didn't have in past settlements. Investment banks and brokerages typically settle alleged misdoing with the SEC and NASD, which were part of the settlement and seldom release evidence useful for subsequent civil action. But Spitzer, who released a report on Merrill when he accused the firm of issuing conflicted research in April, has pledged to help investors recoup any losses through lawsuits by releasing findings, and other states have said the same. A spokeswoman for New York, which investigated Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, declined to comment. A spokesman for Massachusetts, which investigated CSFB, said no timetable had been set and declined to comment further. Officials for Washington, which probed Piper, were not immediately available for comment. Payments varied among the banks, with Citigroup agreeing to shell out $400 million and CSFB agreeing to $200 million. Piper settled separately on Dec. 30 for $32.5 million, including $25 million in fines and restitution. Regulators said the fines reflect degrees of wrongdoing. For most companies, the payments were tiny compared with their annual revenues. But the ensuing flood of lawsuits could dwarf those numbers. Citigroup on Dec. 23 said it would take a $1.3 billion charge in the fourth quarter to pay for the settlement and increase its litigation reserves, which also includes lawsuits stemming from its dealings with Enron Corp. (Other OTC:ENRNQ.PK - News; Additional reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh in Washington and Per Jebsen in New York) biz.yahoo.com