NEW YORK, June 4, 2008 (Lawfuel) — A four-law-firm legal team
with nationally recognized securities law experience has filed
additional investor claims against two subsidiaries of Bear Stearns
Companies, Inc. — Bear Stearns & Co., Inc. and Bear Stearns Securities
Corp. — and the portfolio managers for the Bear Stearns High Grade
Structured Credit Strategies Fund — Ralph R. Cioffi Jr. and Matthew M.
Tannin — over the collapse last year of a Bear Stearns hedge fund.
Arbitration claims were filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority (FINRA) by the law firms of Maddox, Hargett & Caruso, P.C.,
of New York City and Indianapolis, Indiana; Aidikoff, Uhl & Bakhtiari,
of Beverly Hills, California.; Page Perry, LLC, of Atlanta, Ga.; and
David P. Meyer & Associates Co., LPA, of Columbus, Ohio.
The Bear Stearns hedge fund at issue in the latest FINRA claims is the
Bear Stearns High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, which
imploded last summer, causing investors to have all of their capital
wiped out.
Bear Stearns recently disclosed that the events leading up to the
demise of the Bear Stearns High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund
— and the management of the fund by portfolio managers Cioffi and
Tannin — are the subject of a number of criminal and civil regulatory
investigations by the Office of the United States Attorney for the
Eastern District of New York, the United States Securities & Exchange
Commission and others.
According to Steven B. Caruso, of Maddox Hargett & Caruso’s office in
New York City, “Our investigation indicates that officials at Bear
Stearns engaged in a concerted effort to conceal the true state of
affairs at this hedge fund, for an extended period of time before it
imploded and that the victims of this nefarious scheme included both
individual investors and professional money managers from around the
world.”
Added Ryan Bakhtiari, of Aidikoff, Uhl & Bakhtiari, “Given Bear
Stearns’ dominance in the mortgage-backed and derivative securities
underwriting markets, we’re finding, in our investigation of the
circumstances that led to the demise of this fund, that many investors
were simply unaware of what was being held in their portfolios and that
Bear Stearns did not properly disclose related party transactions and
the true nature of the risk of the illiquid securities in the fund’s
investment portfolio. In our opinion, this is a classic example of an
investment firm failing to adequately protect the interests of their
clients.”
The legal team pursuing the arbitration claims includes the immediate
past president and several current and former directors of the Public
Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA), the co-chairman of the
American Bar Association Securities Arbitration Subcommittee, the
current chair and past members of the FINRA National Arbitration and
Mediation Committee (NAMC), a former general counsel of a national
brokerage company, a former state securities commissioner, and a past
member of the NASD Securities Arbitration Policy Task Force.
