Still, 50 lawsuits, countless requests for information from prosecutors and regulators, and numerous investigations from the same are a lot to deal with even for a totally innocent party. So it’s going to be pragmatic, seeking a deal with that most pragmatic of overseers while sifting through the rest of the fallout.

Two subsidiaries—Robinhood Financial and Robinhood Securities—are currently negotiating a settlement with Finra over the outages and the options-trading practices, which could include charges of violations of Finra rules, a fine, restitution to customers and the hiring of a compliance consultant. The probes could cost the company at least $26.6 million, according to the filing.

And, you know, while we’re talking blame game here, maybe we could throw some in the direction of the real culprits, who are also conveniently unaccountable: bots.

Reddit Chief Executive Steve Huffman told Congress this month that bots, artificial or fake accounts with automated content, had not played a “significant role” in GameStop Reddit message traffic.

PiiQ Media’s analysis of Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc, Instagram and YouTube posts, however, found that bots used the platforms to push GameStop and other “meme” stocks…. “We saw clear patterns of artificial behavior across the other four social media platforms. When you think of organic content, it’s variable in the day, variable day-to-day. It doesn’t have the exact same pattern every day for a month,” he said.

Robinhood in Talks to Settle Finra Probes Into Options-Trading Practices, Outages [WSJ]
Robinhood is facing nearly 50 lawsuits over GameStop frenzy. [NYT]
Bots hyped up GameStop on major social media platforms, analysis finds [Reuters]

In a decision issued on Monday, Justice Lucy Billings of the state supreme court in Manhattan called Lauren Bonner’s comment a “fair and accurate” description of her related civil lawsuit against the former president Douglas Haynes, Point72 and the firm’s billionaire founder Steven A. Cohen.

Judge dismisses ex-Point72 president’s defamation lawsuit against woman who alleged sexism [Reuters]

Well, Marilyn Booker is, shall we say, a touch skeptical, since Morgan Stanley decided after 16 years that it didn’t need a chief diversity officer… in December.

She believes she was fired because she pushed too hard to get senior executives in that division to embrace her plan to restructure a program for training black financial advisers. She thought the restructuring would help more recruits succeed….

“My story is the same story as those of many black people on Wall Street,” she said in an interview. “Our fate has been tied to the goodness of whatever white person is in charge. That is no way to have a career…..”

“Morgan Stanley made $41 billion last year — that’s a drop in the bucket, it’s not even a rounding error,” Ms. Booker said of Mr. Gorman’s $25 million pledge. “People have to put these things in context. If there’s a real business initiative that they’re focused on, he’d put more than six basis points into it.”

She Spent 16 Years as Morgan Stanley’s Diversity Chief. Now She’s Suing [NYT]

This is simply the new reality.

In that context, it's pretty wild to see a lawsuit filed just last week that alleges the CEO of a dark pool operation in the year 2019 is still fond of doing things like asking a senior female HR executive at his company "What do you do for sex?"

And yet, here we sit, looking at a lawsuit on November 8th by Mary Corradino, an HR director and Global Head of Talent Acquisition" at the trading platform Liquidnet, alleging years of sexual harassment aimed at her by men at her firm. The suit specifically names CEO Seth Merrin as a co-defendant, and the accusations made against him in the suit make him appear to be a bit...let's go with "Behind the times."

Like this one for instance:

Aside from the obviously hilarious syntax of the question "What do you do for sex?" this appears to be a rather very inappropriate question for a guy to be asking his female subordinate. Call us prudes, but it really seems like Merrin should have allegedly made some better behavioral choices:

See, again, this seems to be a very stupid thing to say to a female subordinate...in front of another executive...and his wife. This Merrin appears to be an allegedly rather silly fellow. But the behavior is also so boldly unctuous and brazenly horny that it feels almost vanilla by today's obscene scale of behavior. Merrin just seems like a guy who maybe says very dumb shit to women that work for him...

Oh, that escalated quickly. 

When asked by Dealbreaker whether the allegations against Merrin are believable, one former employee of Liquidnet said: "Yeah, that's not a shocker." Another former Liquidnet employee responded simply "100 percent." Both sources were complimentary regarding their interactions with Corradino when they worked together.

A spokeswoman for Liquidnet emailed Dealbreaker this statement: 

"Liquidnet does not tolerate sexual harassment or discrimination. We take such claims very seriously and believe they run completely counter to the culture of our company. But believing this is not enough, which is why we will continue our independent investigation to objectively and thoroughly address these allegations. Based on the information reviewed to date, we believe that these claims have no merit and we intend to vigorously defend against them." 

According to that spokeswoman, the investigation is being handled by a third party and overseen by Liquidnet's General Counsel.

And, in even rarer cases, that caricature can transcend itself and become something else altogether, turning the individual into something ethereal and almost meta-human.

Ladies and gentleman, Eddie Lampert is now that rarest of cases:

The bitter fight over the deal that bought Sears Holdings Corp. out of bankruptcy shows no sign of cooling off.

Transform Holdco LLC, the unit of Eddie Lampert’s ESL Investments Inc. that acquired the stores and assets of the bankrupt retailer for over $5 billion in January, is suing the Sears estate for failing to deliver "hundreds of millions of dollars of assets" called for by the sales agreement.

Lampert's Transform is accusing the Sears estate, a bankrupt shell entity that is winding down under court supervision, of multiple wrongs including breaking the agreement by holding on to the chain's headquarters in Illinois. The estate is also intentionally delaying payments to vendors and trying to shift $166 million in accounts payable costs, according to the Transform complaint filed on Saturday.

Suing the estate of something you killed and demanding a trial to talk about how you killed it so you can take money from it is almost too avant-garde. We bask in your dark creativity, sir.

Eddie Lampert Sues Sears Estate, Demands Trial and $130 Million [Bloomberg]

Well, that went well:

So like any slow-moving disaster, people involved are desperate to get out, so now we have one of the funniest lawsuits that we've seen in a very long time:

Block & Leviton LLP, a Boston-based securities litigation firm representing investors nationwide, has filed a securities fraud class action against Lyft, Inc., certain of its officers and directors, and underwriters of its recent initial public offering, alleging violations of the Securities Act of 1933.

The lawsuit alleges that Defendants made false and misleading statements in Lyft’s registration statement and prospectus issued in connection with the company’s March 29, 2019 initial public offering. The alleged misstatements involve Lyft’s claims about its domestic market share, failure to disclose issues surrounding the safety of the company’s bike sharing program, and labor issues.

Oh, Lyft wasn't maybe totally clear that the labor structure of the ridesharing sector is a famously terrible hellscape of uncharted legal nightmares? And there was perhaps some obfuscation about what a financial clusterfuck the business of renting out electric bicycles to the anonymous public might be?

Listen, the Lyft IPO was not handled well, but hiring a lawyer to pretend that you were lied to after buying depreciating stock in an obviously untested business model that openly lost almost a $1 billion last year is the worst kind of venal laziness. If you bought Lyft stock at the IPO because you thought it was a safe investment, you are bad at this. If you bought the stock at the IPO because your advisor told you it was safe, then your advisor is bad at this and you should fire that advisor.

Either shut up and hold your Lyft shares in hope that this comes good or shut up and sell them to get free of your mistake, but regardless of your decision, definitely shut up.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin won more than $200,000 in a lawsuit against a private-jet company after he claimed the company broke an agreement to reimburse him after he terminated his membership. The judgment issued May 14 orders JetCard Plus Inc. of Miami to pay $219,692 to Steven T. Mnuchin Inc., which the Treasury chief owns. JetCard sold members prepaid hours to fly on its jets.

As if you needed another sign that Steve Mnuchin isn't exactly shitting his pants over contempt of Congress threat.

Happy Friday, dipshits!

Mnuchin Wins Almost $220,000 in Private-Jet Company Lawsuit [Bloomberg]

In the suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, the president and his family members argue that the Democratic House committee leaders who issued the subpoenas engaged in a broad overreach.

“This case involves congressional subpoenas that have no legitimate or lawful purpose,” the suit alleges. “The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage. No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.”

As we've talked about here more than a few times, Trump's Deutsche Bank loans almost certainly provide a window into the Trump Organization's habit of not being entirely honest about its finances, but some tinfoil hat types still see them as the likeliest source of Russian leverage over Trump and his family. 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Deutsche spent years being the only lender thirsty enough to bank The Donald, and also the only bank with internal controls so nonexistent that it managed to take a quasi-active role in a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme. And while it has never seemed entirely likely that the Trump Organization was involved in an opaque equities trading crime [because that would require both access to the secret plot and basic level of financial sophistication], it has occurred to more than a few people that Deutsche Bank has been rather indiscriminately moving to offload its massive non-performing debt portfolio for years now, and few things in the world are more inert performers than Donald Trump's debts. 

Factoring in what we know about how European banks panicked over the past decade and how money flowed through the Cypriot banking system and how badly Deutsche wanted to move its bad assets after the crisis, there's enough smoke to have fun contemplating the fire behind conspiracy theories of where Trump's paper ended up.

But we're also 90% certain that nothing is going to come of this other than watching Trump performatively squirm. We aren't even reading into any deeper meaning of the lawsuit, to be honest, Trump sues out of reflex. This isn't even the first time he's sued Deutsche Bank. The idea that Trump might not even know what happened to his debt feels not just possible, but breathtakingly likely. On the issue of whether or not Trump's Deutsche documents will yield evidence of the Trump Family fraudulently misstating their wealth and assets depending on what the situation called for, we are more clear: they will.

And Deutsche Bank will almost certainly do everything it can to comply with Congress because it literally cannot afford not to. 

When Deutsche Bank decided to act against its Teutonic instincts in the 90s and lend money to the most consistently bankrupt man in American real estate, it knew it was taking a risk. But we are literally giggling as we realize that not even the most creative actuary in the whole of Frankfurt could have conceived of a moment when the resulting debt from that loan would be the focus of a Congressional investigation into fraud and potential Russian money laundering used to exert influence over President Donald Trump. It's the most patently absurd thing we've ever heard, and yet...we are living it.

What we have here is the logical conclusion to almost thirty years of bad decision-making by a litany of people who should know better, and also the Trump Family. And we are not at all surprised to find that the whole thing is going to play out in a moist fritto misto of lawsuits, political theater and Eric Trump going on FoxNews to say stupid shit about a situation he clearly only vaguely understands.

We love when a long and layered plot spanning multiple narratives comes together, but part of us wishes that we could at least get a fat, bearded and drunk John Cryan back for the final scene. 

Sears Holding Corp. sued Eddie Lampert, his hedge fund ESL Investment Inc. and directors of ESL and Sears, accusing them of siphoning off billions of dollars worth of assets as the retailer racked up huge losses.

The lawsuit, filed by the bankruptcy team winding down what is left of the company after Mr. Lampert’s recent purchase of Sears stores, alleges the hedge-fund manager and the fund’s board directed executives at the retailer to produce rosy financial projections for a big turnaround even as it accumulated more than $7 billion in losses from 2011 to 2014.

The suit contends the bad-faith financial projections paved the way for the transfer of assets worth over $2 billion to Mr. Lampert and other ESL directors, including Lands’ End Inc. and Sears Hometown Outlet Inc., among others.

Essentially, the lawsuit alleges that Eddie Lampert did what we all assume we just spent years watching Eddie Lampert do but with way more details. Oh, and also we have a pretty special guest star:

In addition to Mr. Lampert, the lawsuit names as defendants U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who was formerly an executive at ESL...

Lampert and Mnuchin being sued for predatory financial behavior? Next thing we'll hear is that Nic Cage is being arraigned for making movies that aren't good.

Considering that Steve Mnuchin has spent his whole life getting away with shit (he even somehow managed one innocuous mention in the first volume of the redacted Mueller Report), we feel pretty good about Lampert's odds here. You can't sue Steve Mnuchin for being his true self. The man is the Zelig of gray area financial malfeasance since 1990. And Eddie Lampert has been his wingman since they lived together in a luxury off-campus apartment while attending Yale, where they joined Skull & Bones and drove Porsches. In fact, if you look at video of Mnuchin's January 2017 confirmation hearing, seated directly behind the mouthbreathing nominee are his wife, some administration aides, and Eddie Lampert.

And let's put that timeline in perspective. In January 2017, Sears was very publicly known to be in rather deep, deep shit, and [other than the internet] Lampert was widely considered to be the biggest problem plaguing America's totemic retailer. Weeks later, Lampert would acknowledge to shareholders that things were real, real bad, and about a year later the company would pop its bankruptcy filing cherry. So it's fair to assume that in January of 2017, Lampert knew that things at Sears were a total mess, and that Mnuchin - as Sears' former chairman and Eddie's ride-or-die homie - knew the situation as well. Yet both men thought that it would be totally cool if the guy who was about to the face of Sears' death sat behind the incoming Treasury Secretary at his Senate hearing. Consider the hubris here, and behold true masters of the craft. 

Lampert and Mnuchin have spent their entire adult lives doing exactly what was done to Sears, and so far it's turned out great. It's very easy to argue that Sears was unsalvagable before Eddie Lampert got his hands on it, but it's even easier to argue that he hastened the company's demise for his own profit. But the easiest argument in the world to make is that this is what guys like Eddie Lampert and his buddy Steve Mnuchin do, and that no one has figured out how to stop them. 

We would be shocked and enthralled if this lawsuit changed any of that. 

Sears Sues Ex-CEO Eddie Lampert, Claiming He Stripped Assets and Left It Broke [WSJ]

Quick recap: A scorpion asks a frog for a ride across a river, the frog hesitates because it's dealing with a scorpion, the scorpion makes promises, a deal is struck, then the scorpion stabs the frog midstream and as they drown, the frog asks "But why, bro?" and the scorpion is all "Cuz I'm a fucking scorpion."

Or if you'd like a different telling, try this:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. put its own interests ahead of that of a corporate client in advising on a wholesale-food company acquisition last year, a new lawsuit alleges.

The suit, filed by United Natural Foods Inc., accuses Goldman of improperly extracting more than $200 million in advising the Providence, R.I., food distributor on its $3 billion acquisition of grocery chain Supervalu Inc.

Well, to be fair, in this version the scorpion survives.

At issue is a roughly $2 billion financing loan Goldman arranged for United Natural Foods on the deal. The company alleges that Goldman arranged the financing in a way that hurt United Natural Foods but benefited the financial firm and its hedge-fund clients that had placed bets in the credit-default swap market against Supervalu. The company also accuses Goldman of taking advantage of the deal’s provisions to extract more money from United Natural Foods.

Ok, the scorpion thrives...

The suit against Goldman also alleges that the firm used its control over the financing to extract more money from United Natural Foods. A person familiar with Goldman’s thinking said that structuring the financing as it did was necessary to get lenders’ participation. Under the financing provisions, Goldman could hike the loan’s interest rate by 1.25 percentage points to make it more attractive to investors.

Another provision allowed Goldman to claim an additional $40.5 million from United Natural Foods if it didn’t have a full 15 days to fund the loan and was unsuccessful in raising the money.

But at the heart of this lawsuit is a complaint that we can't help but read as "your honor, we were just trying to give a mutually advantageous ride to this scorpion..."

In the suit, United Natural Foods alleged that Goldman “consolidated its command over all aspects of the transaction, enabling it to ensure its own profits to the detriment” of United Natural Foods and its shareholders.

United Natural Foods expected Goldman “to provide ethical counsel and unbiased support“ of the deal, said Mr. Spinner, “not leverage their positions to pursue larger profits for themselves and other clients at our expense and ongoing damage.”

BRB, we're off to sue Wells Fargo for being a little cagey about how many savings accounts we have.

Goldman Feasts at Expense of Food-Company Client, Suit Claims [WSJ]

A banner week for bank earnings and a solid week of trading has us all feeling little cocktail ready. The government is still shut down but that's not stopping dem profits from raining down! It's not often you get such a solid Friday feeling, such an unfettered sense of a week gone well. It's almost like all is right along Wall Street...

Hahaha, no fucking way.

A woman who says she was fired from Morgan Stanley without explanation 22 days after maternity leave wrote an open letter to the bank’s chief asking to be released from binding arbitration, so she can sue the firm.

Chau Pham, a former vice president on a foreign-exchange sales team, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, urging it to investigate Morgan Stanley’s treatment of women, according to her attorney, Jeanne Christensen at Wigdor LLP.

Wow, Morgan Stanley, first you poop on the earning party and now you're going to get slapped for firing a woman just back from maternity leave? What you been smoking, Jimmy Gorman?

But, hey, there's two sides to every story. Maybe this lady is just lashing out because she couldn't cut it. If she wants to make this public, she better come with details that make her former Morgan Stanley coworkers look real dumb...

The 24-page complaint alleges that Pham received her first negative performance review after her pregnancy became known, and that managers permanently shifted some of her client accounts to colleagues during her leave. After she returned, her breaks to pump breast milk became a topic of conversation among male coworkers, with one manager asking her repeatedly, “What’s wrong with formula?” according to the complaint.

Yoof...

Pham was fired on Sept. 18, one day after she was to begin arriving at work after 7 a.m. so that she could drop her baby off at daycare, according to her complaint. During her exit, she pressed a manager and a human resources representative for an explanation, but received none, according to the document.

Yup. That'll do it.

Even the most unapologetic bro among you has to admit that these thoughts are not worth sharing out loud at this point in history. This is the kind of mindshatteringly silly stupid shit that you just cannot get away with anymore and likely should never have been able to in the first place. And if you might want to shake your head and think "What's the big deal though? Haven't we heard about much worse in the last year or two?", give us a moment to explain what you might not be seeing.

Actually, let Chau Pham do it:

In her letter, Pham asked Chief Executive Officer James Gorman to “do the right thing” and let her litigate claims in open court. “You recently said that Morgan Stanley is ‘not where we want to be, but we’re making progress,’” she wrote him. “Forcing female employees to pursue discrimination claims in secrecy is not ‘making progress.’”

If Pham's allegations prove to be verifiably true, and she airs them in public outside of binding arbitration, it will be a small embarrassment for Morgan Stanley. Big banks would like to think that simple gender equity stuff like maternity leave solved already, so this kind of legal headache is actually a nostalgic pain-in-the-ass. Gorman and co. will have to do a lot of performative internal thinking on this and Morgan Stanley HR will have a shitty few weeks.

But if Pham's allegations are proven and she gets out of binding arbitration, Morgan Stanley will not be alone in feeling suddenly and deeply uncomfortable. Binding arbitration has been something of a magical shield for Wall Street, providing cover from the #MeToo crusade. If Chau Pham can take Morgan Stanley to the public woodshed for shitty comments about formula and difficulty finding pre-dawn childcare, cast your mind forward to the kind of stories other women in finance want to tell about bad behavior in the workplace? 

Somehow, we think that might end with embarrassments that go beyond tone-deaf responses to basic maternity leave rights. Don't you?

So enjoy that cocktail, Wall Street, but maybe rethink how many. After all, your old pal binding arbitration is looking a little shaky these days.

But, yeah, solid quarter.

UPDATE: We have a copy of the open letter. Read it here.

Morgan Stanley Banker Fired After Maternity Leave Writes CEO [Bloomberg]

Suffice it to say that we've uttered in hushed breath, "Please, gods of financial news, bring Sage Kelly back to us." And, lo, our prayers have been answered...kinda.

Per Bloomberg:

Jefferies Financial Group Inc. is going after Cantor Fitzgerald LP, the home of its former star banker Sage Kelly, suing the brokerage and three investment bankers who left the firm last year.

The bank filed a lawsuit in London last month against Cantor and three bankers in its power, energy and infrastructure group. Jefferies lost 24 people in the energy coverage team to its New York-based rival last year.

Yes, this is a rather boring return for a true Dealbreaker hero. And, yes, we knew he was thirsty for talent. And, yes, we understand that this isn't directly about Kelly himself, but it also kind of is...

While brokers have regularly turned to the U.K. courts to combat poaching of their staff, it’s rarer for a bank to do so. The lawsuit comes about a year after the bankers moved to Cantor, lured by Kelly, who now leads the firm’s investment bank.

Of course, some light talent poaching is G-Rated stuff for the King of Wall Street Libidos, but maybe just hang tight and we'll see what discovery finds about how Sage lured all these bankers into his orbit.

After all, prayers are being answered left and right these days...

Jefferies Sues Cantor in U.K. After Its Bankers Leave for Brokerage [Bloomberg]

But this being Jeff Gundlach, it would be best if you don't fuck with him while he's trying to enjoy himself. Like when he's trying to drink some fine-ass wine:

Jeffrey Gundlach, one of the world's best-known bond investors, has sued a California wine merchant he said sold him several dozen bottles of fake wine, including Bordeaux that experts consider among the greatest wines ever made.
In lawsuits filed on Friday, the founder of DoubleLine Capital claimed that at least 67 bottles he bought from Soutirage were fake, and that it would cost more than $1 million to replace them.

We don't know what makes us more furious, the fact that someone tried to scam a stone-cold connoisseur like J-Gundz, or that they left us just two bottles short of a slam dunk Gundlach joke.

And did they really think that they were going to get away with this? Had they met Gundlach? This is not a man that likes getting screwed.

Gundlach said Soutirage assured him the wines were real after he expressed concern, but that subsequent testing by a "world-renowned" expert he hired proved otherwise.
Among the wines he said were bogus were several classic wines from the Bordeaux region in France, including a 1928 Latour, a 1947 Cheval Blanc, and a magnum of 1961 Petrus.

And in case any of you doubt the veracity of the idea that J-Gundz is suing someone over wine, there's this:

"Soutirage is nothing but a crass huckster," Gundlach said in a complaint filed in a California state court in Los Angeles.

Yup. That's him.

DoubleLine's Gundlach sues California wine merchant over bogus Bordeaux [Reuters]

The Former House of Hank has been dragged through the mud and federal courthouses more than once since being essentially taken over by the Treasury Department but refusing to act like it, and the court of public opinion has been unkind to the firm even after the government sold back it's AIG stock at a profit. And we won't even get into Snowflake Greenberg's inheritance.

But through it all, AIG has pretty much been seen as a massive collection of staid financiers and accountants who just made some bad decisions for a few years, like trying to use taxpayer money as petty cash. AIG never got tarred with the Wall Street bad boy brush though, because one never heard of any randy caveman shenanigans happening just north of the State Island Ferry terminal. But it now appears AIG is looking to maybe make up for lost time...

Take it away, NYPost:

A former AIG underwriter is suing the insurance giant and her ex-boss, claiming the exec perpetuated a “boys club” atmosphere — which included male employees hiding under women’s desks to peek up their skirts, and licking female colleagues.

We read a lot of these things, but even we're unfamiliar with desk-hiding and... umm, licking. We even went so far as to check the actual complaint for the phrase "horned-up toddlers." But let's take a deeper dive:

Marlee Valenti had been an award-winning employee for two years before she was transferred to work under now-Vice President Michael Donnelly, according to her suit, filed Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
She then became subject to a “never-ending stream” of harassment from 10 men under Donnelly’s supervision, court papers allege.
“Male employees would sneak under the desks of female employees in order to look up their skirts,” the suit reads.
Valenti and other women were also “groped, licked or forced to endure other forms of harassment” from male colleagues, she says. Valenti was fired after she complained, the suit says.

We have perhaps never seen an allegation so lacking in the unctuous predatory subtlety one usually associates with Wall Street sexual harassment suits. In fact, this kind of detailed description of unhinged pre-adolescent arousal being so commonplace makes us think that AIG has either done an exemplary job of tamping this down over the years or a floodgate is about to open from law offices around Manhattan sending rivers of accusations flowing towards South Ferry.

For their part, AIG said this to The Post:

“We believe this suit and the claims it makes are without merit,” an AIG spokesman said.

We have to disagree. The suit merits at least a few close reads.

Ex-AIG worker sues over ‘never-ending stream’ of harassment [NYP]

To be fair, Wells Fargo's statement re: the settlement doesn't include anything about "Needing to allocate all of our time to deal with this f*cking accounts scandal that gets worse in ways we couldn't imagine by the day," but maybe it's implied.

Wells Fargo & Co has agreed to pay $50 million to settle a racketeering lawsuit accusing it of overcharging hundreds of thousands of homeowners for appraisals ordered after they defaulted on their mortgage loans. Wells Fargo's settlement of the lawsuit comes as the bank is still recoiling from a scandal over sales targets that drove employees to create unauthorized accounts for customers. Multiple lawsuits over those practices are pending. Spokesman Tom Goyda said Wells Fargo believes its appraisal practices were proper and disagreed with the lawsuit's claims but settled to avoid further litigation.

Wells Fargo agrees to $50 million settlement over homeowner fees [Reuters]

Hedge fund manager James Dondero is currently fighting legal battles on two fronts: one is versus an ex-portfolio manager who say he was fired for raising questions about Dondero’s alleged plan to “use money due to outside investors…to buy a South American company that he intended to convert into a condom manufacturer” and also about Dondero’s use, allegedly, of the term “jackasses” to describe said investors. The other is versus a bunch of investors themselves, who, in addition to claiming Dondero owes them money, say he enjoys referring to them as "idiots."

Highland’s founders James Dondero and Mark Okada have fought an unusual number of legal battles since the crisis. But the two new lawsuits mark the first time organized committees representing all investors in the liquidating hedge funds have sued the firm; one of the committees recently scored a victory in its case. The lawsuits claim Highland, which manages about $17 billion, enriched itself by secretly taking a roughly $30 million fee out of one fund, called Crusader, and inappropriately selling assets from a second, called Credit Strategies...One of the largest investments left in the fund in 2011 was a 19% private-equity stake in Cornerstone Healthcare Group, an acute-health-care company majority owned by Highland and its other hedge funds. The shares became a flashpoint in 2012 after Highland proposed selling the stake to Cornerstone for less than what investors considered fair value. Investors led by the Colburn Foundation, a Los Angeles-based classical-music charity, and investment adviser Concord Management refused and tempers flared. Mr. Dondero called the investors “idiots,” and “disrespectful,” for questioning the proposed share sale, according to emails disclosed in court documents. He also pushed the investors to start paying Highland a $250,000 monthly management fee for liquidating the defunct fund because of the “significant monthly legal expenses” involved, according to the emails.

Terms Dondero will surely be accused of using about his investors in any potential future lawsuits? Smart money's gotta go with:

• Bozos
• Clowns
• Morons
• Sh*ts-for-brains
• Mouth-breathers

Highland Capital Investors Allege Wrongdoing in Long-Closed Hedge Funds [WSJ]

With all that's gone on over the last few months-- the implosion of John Stumpf's career, the implosion of Deutsche Bank, the implosion of the Republican party-- you might have forgotten that there was a little trial going on between Goldman Sachs and the Libyan Investment Authority. The two parties met in court because the LIA decided to sue Goldman, claiming the bank took advantage of it vis-à-vis nine equity derivatives trades the Libyans didn't understand, costing the LIA $1.2 billion and scoring Goldman Sachs a profit of $222 million. Additionally, the LIA claimed that Goldman not only took advantage of their employees' financial naivete but manipulated them by giving some kid an internship, taking them on lavish vacations, and buying them hookers. For its part, Goldman Sachs has argued the Libyans knew exactly what they were doing and blamed Goldman for the losses out of a fear of being executed.* Today, a judge said she agreed with the bank, hookers or no.

“The key people in the LIA who needed to understand the trades did discuss and agree the structure of the trades with Goldman Sachs,” the judge said. “There are no grounds for concluding that the level of profits earned by Goldman Sachs on the disputed trades was excessive.” [...] Goldman’s court win came after a trial that included salacious allegations against the U.S. bank. Among these, the LIA alleged Youssef Kabbaj, a former Goldman banker who worked closely with the Libyans, paid for two prostitutes in Dubai to entertain himself and Mr. Zarti’s younger brother, Haitem. Mr. Kabbaj denied paying for a prostitute for the young man. He declined to comment on whether he paid for a prostitute for himself. “I fully accept that the extent of the entertainment offered by Mr. Kabbaj to Haitem was inappropriate and in flagrant breach of Goldman Sachs’ policy on entertaining clients,” Ms. Rose said in her judgment. “However, it does not seem to me relevant to the matters I have to decide.”

Goldman Sachs Wins Legal Battle With Libyan Wealth Fund [WSJ]
Goldman Sachs Wins Suit Over $1.2 Billion Libyan Fund Losses [Bloomberg]

*Per the testimony of Andrea Vella, co-head of Asian investment banking: "If we put ourselves in Libya at the time, it can��t have been easy to have been the person or the team that decides to make an investment and loses a billion dollars while the market is melting down. And so at that point you either get, you know, executed, maybe to use a hyperbole, or you put the blame on someone else."

Remember AIG? Li'l insurer that required a 12-figure bailout by the U.S. government and invoked the rage of mild-mannered college professor in a Federal Reserve Chairman's body Ben Bernanke? The guys and girls in the unit that f*cked up the most out of anyone at the company are in court today over the matter of backpay they believed they're owed. $100 million to be exact and they'd like it in small, unmarked bills. And be quick about it- they've waited long enough and have likely deferred dreams of using the money as seed capital for new economy-torpedoing financial products.

American International Group Inc. was sued by former staff who say they were denied $100 million in bonuses amid public outrage over derivative trades that crippled the insurer and threatened the stability of global financial markets. Details of the U.K. lawsuit, which was filed in 2014, emerged at a London court hearing Friday. The 23 traders, analysts and managers, who worked at a subsidiary of AIG Financial Products Corp., were denied deferred compensation because of “significant media and political pressure” resulting from the U.S. government’s rescue deal, according to documents their lawyers submitted for the preliminary hearing. AIG’s Financial Products unit almost brought down the company with money-losing derivative bets backing subprime mortgages. The U.S. saved AIG in a 2008 rescue that then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said made him “more angry” than any other measure the government took to counter the financial crisis. The bailout swelled to $182.3 billion, and public ire intensified after the company committed to paying hundreds of millions of dollars in retention awards to keep AIGFP staff so they could help unwind trades.

AIG Sued for $100 Million in Bonuses by Ex-Derivatives Staff [Bloomberg]

Last month, we learned that in addition to pressuring employees to open millions of fake accounts in customers' names, Wells Fargo also had an unofficial program in place wherein the bank would come up with the shadiest possible ways to can people who spoke up about unethical sales practices. Sayeth one former human resources manager: "If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them." According to Reuters, at least five former employees filed suits or complaints with regulators between 2010 and 2014, alleging that they were fired for blowing the whistle, raising the whole "What did Wells know about these fake accounts and when did they know it and did they take the complaints seriously or try to cover them up and screw over the whistleblowers" angle.

Two of those former employees were personal bankers Judi Klosek and Yesenia Guitron, who filed a joint lawsuit in 2010, in which Klosek alleged the bank very classily "gave away her position while she was on disability to receive treatment for breast cancer," while Guitron claimed her managers responded to claims she witnessed unethical behavior by "falsifying a paper trail that purported to document her poor performance, forbidding her from taking family medical leave and firing her improperly." Also, this:

Guitron was told on numerous occasions by “Branch management” to unbutton her shirt to get more sales. One day Pam Rubio, the branch manager, sent her a text message requesting permission to open a package that Guitron had received from a customer, “an admirer,” and asking who it was from. Isook Park, the branch service manager, made comments to Guitron, including, “Call your boyfriends and have them all open accounts.” She asked Guitron questions about whom she was dating and whom she would bring to Christmas parties or bank events. On one occasion, Chris Jensen, another service manager, told Guitron, “Go and shake your skirt to the farm workers in the corner so we can get some accounts.” Guitron refused to engage in these practices and was offended by them. Prior to the time that Guitron began to work at the St. Helena branch, Liz Mendez, who worked there as a Personal Banker from December 2000 through January 2007, was told about once a week by Rubio, “Maybe if you unbutton that top button you’ll get more accounts.”

Marcela Franco, who was employed by Wells Fargo from November 2001 through January 2007, again, before Guitron began working there, heard Rubio make similar comments to other employees on multiple occasions. Matt Taylor, a single father who worked at the St. Helena branch as a financial consultant, was never encouraged to use his physical assets to achieve more sales.

While a judge dismissed Guitron's claims, saying the bank "was justified for firing her because she failed to meet sales quotas and refused to meet with management," she told Reuters "she feels vindicated by the sanctions" her former employer has been forced to pay since all this sh*t has come to light.

Wells Fargo workers say they were fired for reporting "gaming" of sales quotas [Reuters]
Wells Fargo whistleblower says she flagged fraud years ago [CBS News]

Related: Things Definitely Not Getting Better For Wells Fargo

Remember Joshua Terry? Ex-Highland Capital portfolio manager about yea high? (We have no idea how tall he is.) Was fired by the firm (and subsequently sued) for allegedly self-dealing, having sexual relations with an underling, and talking smack about Highland executives? Who claims the real reason he was fired was that he raised questions about Highland president James Dondero's alleged plan to "use money due to outside investors...to buy a South American company that he intended to convert into a condom manufacturer" and also about Dondero's alleged use of the term "jackasses" to describe said investors? A judge has said an arbitrator should hear Terry's side of the story.

A state court judge in Dallas on Thursday granted Terry’s request to send the dispute to arbitration. The judge said it made sense to have Terry’s claims considered first by an arbitrator. Highland asked the judge to order Terry not to disclose confidential information, including recordings of the conversations [that Terry secretly recorded his colleagues and investors], and to force Terry’s lawyers to quit because their case benefited from access to the recordings. The judge said the issue of Terry’s lawyers would be up to the arbitrator to decide...Terry’s lawyer, Rogge Dunn, said he and his client were “very pleased with the judge’s ruling.”

Fired Manager Can Challenge Highland Capital in Arbitration [Bloomberg]

Earlier: This Hedge Fund vs. Ex-Employee Lawsuit HAS EVERYTHING

Earlier this week, bond manager Bill Gross demanded that his former employer Pimco, which he is suing, be punished for "unfairly impeding him from pursuing his $200 million lawsuit against the asset management firm." (Gross, you may recall, claims that Pimco fired him even though the handwritten resignation note he left in the middle of the night seemingly undermines said claim though not according to Bill.) According to Bill and his attorneys, Pimco has been and continues to engage in "willful and bad-faith obstruction" of their attempts to gather evidence that will make Gross's case. According to Pimco, Bill is one to talk re: not being forthcoming with crucial pieces of information, like the existence of an America Online Account, whose associated screen-name we can only assume is WillyG44 or BillyAtDaBeach.

Pimco’s lawyers in their Tuesday filing accused Mr. Gross of withholding initially the existence of an AOL email account they had discovered through document requests to Janus. They also accused him of anonymously mailing to a Bloomberg News reporter confidential information on the 2013 compensation of key Pimco executives, including chief investment officer Dan Ivascyn, former chief executive Mohamed El-Erian and CEO Doug Hodge.

...in addition to being the Glenn Close to their Michael Douglas.

In Pimco’s filing, the firm’s lawyers also accused the bond investor of harboring a “sad obsession with attacking his former employer and colleagues.”

Pimco says Bill Gross leaked bonus data, shows bad faith [Reuters]
Pimco Says Bill Gross Has ‘Sad Obsession’ With Former Firm [WSJ]

Earlier: Bill Gross Wants Pimco Put In A Time Out; PIMCO Is The Ex-Girlfriend Bill Gross Can’t Stop Stalking On Facebook

Back in October, Bill Gross sued Pimco, the company he co-founded in 1971, claiming that management owed him a bonus he never received after being fired. Some people might be fully willing to accept the firing allegation without hearing further evidence, based on the fact that in the months leading up to Gross's departure from the firm, he:

• Didn't let employees look him in the eye
• Docked people's pay for single typos
• Fined, on at least one occasion, a trader for sitting when Gross thought he should've been standing
• Referred to himself as "Secretariat"
• Called Reuters and told reporters that his former colleague, Mohammed El-Erian, had ghostwritten a negative article about him for the Wall Street Journal
• Told Reuters he had proof of the above because he'd been monitoring El-Erian's phone calls
• Told Reuters to stop taking "his side"</li>

Other people might consider the handwritten resignation note Gross left in the middle of the night (which read "This letter will confirm my resignation from PIMCO as of Sept. 26th, 2014 at 6:29 AM PST") as a problematic for the whole firing narrative. (Bill Gross is not on of those people.) As of late June, Gross was saying he was confident he'd win the suit but the caveat to that is apparently those f*ckers in Newport Beach getting out of his way, which they haven't and for which they should be taught a lesson.

Bond fund manager Bill Gross on Friday said Pacific Investment Management Co and its lawyers should be punished for unfairly impeding him from pursuing his $200 million lawsuit against the asset management firm, which he co-founded. In a court filing, Gross accused Pimco of "willful and bad-faith obstruction" of his efforts to gather evidence to which he is entitled, including by scheduling depositions in London and Hong Kong, some 6,000 miles (9,656 km) apart, on consecutive days in early November. "Discovery is not, and should not be, a game to be manipulated in this manner," Gross said in a filing with the California Superior Court in Santa Ana. "Substantial sanctions" against Pimco and its lawyers are justified to cover his legal bills stemming from the alleged misconduct, and "to punish Pimco's gamesmanship," he added.

Bill Gross wants Pimco, lawyers punished for 'bad-faith' tactics [Reuters]

Related: Bill Gross Confident He’ll Win Lawsuit Against Ex-Employer For Firing Him Even Though Handwritten Resignation Note, Departure In The Middle Of The Night Maybe Undermines That Thesis

Remember when Lynn Tilton sued the Securities and Exchange Commission? You should, because it was just last April. In June, the private equity chief was informed she didn't get what she wanted out of the legal action (a court ruled the SEC could proceed with its fraud charges against her through "in-house administrative proceedings"). And while some other PE execs might've just just rolled over and taken the ruling, Lynn Tilton is used to getting what she wants, be it employees doing Jell-O shots off of her stomach, employees licking whipped cream off of her rack, or a naughty Santa outfit that's sold out everywhere and has to be custom-made. So now this is happening, again:

Lynn Tilton, the New York financier accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding her investors, on Friday sued the regulator to stop it from pursuing in-house enforcement cases against her and others. The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court by Tilton and her firm Patriarch Partners accused the SEC of violating their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection.

Lynn Tilton sues SEC, calls enforcement cases unconstitutional [Reuters]

Remember, back in June, when Citigroup went to war with AT&T over the latter's use of the word "thanks"? Because someone at the bank thought that it was trademark infringement of Citi's totally unique "thanks"? And hilariously demanded "a halt to any infringements, triple and punitive damages and other remedies"? And claimed that would-be and existing customers were so stupid that they'd accidentally enroll with AT&T when they meant to sign up with Citi? A judge has ruled that definitely someone stupid here, but it's not the customers...

US District Judge Katherine Forrest acknowledged “thankyou” and “AT&T thanks” both “share five central letters, are partially pronounced similarly and both convey a message of gratitude.” But her decision gave even more credence to the fact that the two companies sharing those letters are in different businesses — banking and credit cards versus telecommunications services...the court dismissed confusion there on grounds that consumers savvy enough to enroll in loyalty programs would “clearly take into account the attributes associated with the products they purchase.”

AT&T beats Citi challenge over saying ‘thanks’ to customers [NYP]

Earlier: Citigroup Goes To War With AT&T Over The Word “Thanks”

Once upon a time, being named a vice-president of Goldman Sachs actually meant something and signified you were an important, senior-ish member of the firm. Then the bank started doling out the titles like candy to the tune of 13,000 VPs and it came to mean "not a 2-bit first year analyst, but not much more important than that." A happy byproduct of the title inflation phenomenon was that management could make a whole lot of employees feel like they were a big deal, without having to do much else. An unfortunate byproduct was that it made those same people feel like they were an essential, integral part of the firm to the extent that they were important enough to have their attorney fees paid, should they encounter some legal issues. But such is not the case!

As Sergey Aleynikov will tell you, Goldman Sachs gets to make case-by-case rulings re: which VPs are real/legit VPs and which are VPs only in fake title/get to pay their own legal bills.

(The former have generally allowed themselves to be thrown under the bus to save the firm's ass, while the latter are coders the bank wants to lock up in federal prison even though more than one appeals court has said no dice.)

Now, ex-Goldmanite Joseph Jiampietro gets to find out if that "managing director" title he had on his business card all those years actually meant something or if he was actually a glorified associate and thereby on the hook for $350,000.

Joseph Jiampietro, a onetime managing director at the company’s investment banking division, was fired in 2014 for failing to tell his superiors that an associate who used to work at the Fed e-mailed secret central bank documents to him, according to a complaint filed Thursday in Wilmington, Delaware. Jiampietro maintains he was a Goldman Sachs officer at the time of the government investigation and was therefore entitled to have his attorney fees and expenses paid by the bank as outlined in its by-laws. The federal probe didn’t result in any charges against Jiampietro. The case may hinge on how a judge interprets Jiampietro’s title of managing director. The same Delaware court this month ruled Goldman Sachs wasn’t required to pay the legal fees of Sergey Aleynikov, a former programmer accused of stealing the investment bank’s computer-trading code, simply because his title was vice president. “Goldman Sachs has wrongfully refused to indemnify him for attorneys’ fees and expenses incurred in connection with his successful defense of the investigations,” Jiampietro’s attorney, Adam Ford, said in the complaint.

Goldman Sachs Sued by Ex-Manager Over Fed Secrets Leak Probe [Bloomberg]

Related: Goldman Sachs Gets To Decide Which VPs Are Real VPs And Which Get To Pay Their Own Legal Bills

Judge Robert Sweet has rule that was pretty uncool of Sam Molinaro. Not like Jimmy Cayne hogging all the Funyons after huffing on the contents of a bag of oregano in his office uncool, but uncool in its own way.

A federal judge sharply criticized statements and actions by former executives of Bear Stearns Cos in the final days of the investment bank, saying important information was “withheld from the public” and allowing a shareholder lawsuit to move forward..In the ruling, Sweet said the plaintiff, investor Bruce S. Sherman, produced “evidence from inside Bear demonstrating an active attempt to hide facts” that undermined statements executives made at the time about the firm’s financial strength. The judge cited an e-mail submitted earlier in the case in which then-finance chief Sam Molinaro wrote of needing to “create more liquidity asap” on the same day he told investors the company’s liquidity and capital was “very strong.”

Bear Stearns Withheld Details on Financial Condition, Judge Says [Bloomberg]

• The party was about charity and it raised $100,000 for animals
• The party was "good clean fun" and "nothing illegal" occurred
• The owner had demanded cash upfront (which Barna refused) and then afterwards attempted to get more money than was initially agreed upon
• "This is about Mr. Amanat trying to create the most ridiculous story he can to try to pressure me into giving him more money"
• Before and after photos of the property show there was no damage done
• The dwarves are friends of his who he's known for five years

Fired hedge funder: Hamptons party was 'good clean fun' [CNBC]

Related: Owner Of Allegedly Trashed Hamptons House Runs Into His Own Legal Troubles (Being Arrested On Fraud Charges); Can Anyone Spare $500K For The Owner Of The Allegedly Trashed Hamptons House Currently Being Held On Bail?; Moore Capital Portfolio Manager Who (Allegedly!) Trashed A Hamptons House With Midgets Not A Moore Cap PM Anymore; If This Hedge Fund PM’s Gotta Trash A $20 Million Hamptons House With Some Gun-Toting Midgets To Raise Awareness For Animals, Then That’s (Allegedly!) What He’s Gonna Do

Back in May, a managing director from Bank of America named Megan Messina filed a lawsuit against her employer, alleging "egregious pay disparity" compared to her male colleagues (claiming that a man with whom she shared the co-head of global structured credit products title received more the double her compensation); violations of whistleblower protections; and a general culture of bias towards employees with testicles, in which her boss was allowed to "treat her like a summer intern," ban her from certain client events, and pose questions like "Have your eyes always been that blue?" In the suit, Messina (via her lawyers) summed up the environment at BofA as that of a "Bro's Club."

For the most part, it's been pretty much accepted by now that for the majority of its existence, Wall Street has been a club for bros. The only people who might quibble with that label are the men who worked on Wall Street in 1940 or earlier, and their argument wouldn't be that Wall Street wasn't a bro club, but that the phrase is completely redundant because Wall Street is no place for the ladies, unless they're working as secretaries. And while a lot of employers have done a lot to change the club to both include women and treat them as equals, few people would say that things are 100% fixed. See: a report of the pay gap for women in elite jobs that came out the same week Messina filed her lawsuit and "I was walking through Midtown with a managing director when he sped ahead of me to look at a woman. 'I had to get a look at those tits,' he said."

Now, most people with brains understand that when Messina and her lawyers used the phrase "Bro's Club," they were not referring to an official club that meets regularly and takes roll call and sends out weekly minutes on official letterhead, but as a way of describing a setting in which less overt, more insidious transgressions against women were allowed to take place. Bank of America, on the other hand...

In an answer to the suit filed late Friday, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank rejected most of the allegations without further comment. However, it specifically denied the existence of a bro’s club, saying the term was never used by her supervisor or other managers and was invented by Messina and her lawyers.

Bank of America Denies Existence of Alleged ‘Bro’s Club’ [Bloomberg]

Earlier: Senior Female Banker Accuses BofA Of Pay Discrimination, Front-Running, Assembling “Bro’s Club Of All-Male Sycophants”

On a day when nothing has gone the way you thought it was supposed to, let us all take comfort in the fact that we can always rely on a guy who allegedly lied about his qualifications to allegedly misappropriate investor funds to buy strippers.

Calling himself the “frack master,” Texas businessman Chris Faulkner charmed hundreds of investors and major media companies into believing he had extensive experience in energy markets. It turns out he had none and that at least $30 million he raised was spent on strippers, escorts, lavish vacations and other personal expenses, according to Wall Street’s top cop.

And that the sort of person who would allegedly do such a thing would also allegedly have a nickname for the Amex he allegedly used to pay said strippers.

Faulkner’s alleged transgressions include using money from his Brietling Energy Corp. to pay off an American Express card that he referred to as his “whore card,” the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said in a complaint filed Friday. Faulkner and seven others, including Breitling chief operating officer Jeremy Wagers, defrauded investors out of about $80 million over the course of the past five years, the SEC said.

And that he would resent the hurtful characterizations made by the Securities and Exchange Commission, while simultaneously defending his alleged "entertaining" of clients.

“These allegations are not true or accurate,” said Larry Friedman, an attorney who represents Faulkner and the company. “The personal accusations about Faulkner are out of place and uncalled for. Entertaining is part of raising investor capital from high net worth individuals.”

When everything is going so wrong, breathe easy knowing that at least one thing is (allegedly!) going right.

SEC Sues ‘Frack Master’ for Spending Investor Cash on Strippers [Bloomberg]

Here are some things bond fund manager Bill Gross did at the office in the months leading up to his parting ways with PIMCO, the company he co-founded:

• Didn't let employees look him in the eye
• Referred to himself as "Secretariat"
• Docked people's pay for single typos
• On at least one occasion, fined a trader for sitting when Gross thought he should've been standing
• Tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Pimco execs to dock Mohammed El-Erian's pay in an attempt to get ME-E to sue Pimco
• Told Reuters he monitored El-Erian's phone calls

Taken together, you'd think the behavior would, at best, call for a serious discussion during Gross's annual 360 review and at worst be cause for firing the guy, which is exactly what Gross claims in a lawsuit Pimco did. As a reminder, here's what Pimco has had to say about that:

"He exited Pimco’s Newport Beach offices for the last time without telling anyone he was leaving [leaving only a handwritten resignation note saying his resignation was effective Sept. 26, 2014, at 6:29 a.m. Pacific time]. His longtime colleagues first learned of Mr. Gross’s departure from a press release issued by his new employer, Janus Capital Group, early on the morning of September 26, 2014."

But if you were worried Bill Gross was worried about said note impacting his chances of winning the suit, worry not!

Asked if he thought he'd win, Gross simply responded, "Oh, yeah."

Oh, and by the by, none of this is about money or revenge or performance art. It's about a little thing called r-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it means to BG.

"I thought it was unfair. I wanted to stay at Pimco, I wanted to step back from CIO and to manage some smaller accounts, even giving up the Total Return Fund, but it didn't seem to work for them and I always wondered why," he said. "So I wanted to gain back some self respect, because they let me go without even telling me why I was supposed to leave."

No further questions.

Bill Gross on lawsuit: 'I didn't have much to gain except for my self respect' [CNBC]

Related: Bill Gross’s Handwritten Resignation Note, Departure In The Middle Of The Night Kiiiinda Undermining Bold Claim He Was Fired From Pimco; Bill Gross Finds A Way To Insult Both Former And Current Employer

The bankers were “like a swarm,” said LIA financial consultant Ali Jalal Baruni as he tried to name the many Goldman Sachs employees he’d met while advising the LIA between April and September 2007. Baruni, a former Saudi American Bank executive appointed to help the LIA make sensible investments, resigned in protest when the LIA decided to invest in Goldman’s Petershill Fund against his advice, according to his witness statement. "I felt almost under attack as different Goldman Sachs teams and products were presented to me, one after the other and almost relentlessly, without me even being given the opportunity to ask questions or reflect on them," Baruni said.

Goldman Bankers Were ‘Like a Swarm,’ Libya Fund Adviser Says [Bloomberg]

Earlier: Prostitute Goldman Sachs Banker Procured For Libyan Client Drove A Hard Bargain; Libya To Goldman Sachs: We’re Naive, But You’re Mean

"Thank you." It's one of the most oft uttered phrases in the English language and in many cases has nothing to do with banking. But Citigroup is pretty sure that when people hear "thank you" they think Citi and not just "thank you" but any variations thereof. So if At&T thought it was just gonna waltz in and start using using the word "thanks" in its biz, it thought wrong!

Citigroup Inc (C.N) on Friday sued AT&T Inc (T.N), saying the phone company infringed its trademarks in the phrase "thankyou" by using the terms "thanks" and "AT&T thanks" in a new customer loyalty program. The fourth-largest U.S. bank filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. It seeks a halt to any infringements, triple and punitive damages and other remedies.

Citigroup sues AT&T for trademark infringement [Reuters via Felix Salmon]