http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/29/93170/in-another-wall-street-misdeed.html
Does Wall Street do anything honestly?
But then again....To big to fail doesn't have to does it.
They just pay the offence away. It's a standard practice.
In another black eye for Wall Street, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission late Thursday announced a $14 million fine against Morgan Stanley Capital Group Inc. for allegedly hiding its complex oil trades.
The settlement, in which Morgan Stanley did not admit or deny the accusations, comes as oil prices have continued their steady upwards march and have some oil analysts again saying that excessive speculation is again pushing up energy prices. One recent estimate put the cost of that to consumers and businesses at $300 billion annually.
In an announcement after U.S. markets had closed, the CFTC said that a trader from Morgan Stanley conspired on Feb. 6, 2009, with a counterpart from Swiss financial firm UBS Securities to hide from authorities a prohibited trading activity.
The CFTC said Morgan Stanley was on the other end of a deal with a client of UBS. Morgan Stanley was looking to buy more than 33,000 March-dated contracts for future delivery of oil and sell the same quantities of April contracts for oil. The two parties agreed to a deal in which they’d settle on a price after trading had finished for the day_ something called a Trade at Settlement agreement.
The problem, said regulators, is that Morgan Stanley asked its unidentified business partner, the UBS client, to not disclose the special trade until after oil trading had settled that day. The law requires immediate notification to the New York Mercantile Exchange, where oil is traded
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/29/93170/in-another-wall-street-misdeed.html#ixzz0mYeiV3n6
