William Galvin, Secretary of State of Massachusetts, announced charges this morning against Oppenheimer in connection with its sales of auction-rate securities. This is the first such administrative action against a "downstream" seller of ARS (i.e. a brokerage firm that sold the securities but was not involved in the underwriting process).
From the press release: “Oppenheimer executives betrayed the trust of their clients by continuing to market these auction rate securities as safe cash equivalents when they knew this was not the case. They kept their clients, and their own advisors to those clients, in the dark, even as they, themselves, got out of that tottering market.”
Posted by Paul Malmfeldt on November 18, 2008.
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