Senior VP suing HSBC for retaliation is terminated

Michael Picarella, an HSBC senior vice president who’s suing the bank for retaliation after pointing out sexual harassment against top brass, has left the bank, The Post has learned.

Picarella’s departure last week came after continuing disintegration of his relationship with the bank over a lawsuit filed in June.

“HSBC has further retaliated against Plaintiff by terminating his employment,” according to a letter filed Monday afternoon in Manhattan federal court.

Last week, the 47-year-old Picarella filed to amend his lawsuit against the bank after being denied a bonus.

Since December, he had been kept from entering the bank’s Midtown office where he worked and, later, was unable to access bank computer systems, The Post had earlier reported.

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Chase Student Lending closing Tampa operations, leads to layoffs

JPMorgan Chase is shutting down its student lending line of business in Tampa.

Sixty-five workers will lose their jobs whenChase Student Lending exits the Tampa market, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed March 26 with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

The layoffs are expected to begin on May 25 for workers located at three Chase sites in Tampa: at 4900 Memorial Highway, 4919 Memorial Highway and 4915 Independence Parkway.

JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) decided in 2013 to get out of the student loan business. Competition from federal government programs and increased scrutiny from regulators limited Chase’s ability to expand the business, Reuters reported.

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Foreclosure victims to demand money from settlements

People who lost homes to foreclosure will rally Tuesday to demand they get a share of Delaware’s settlement money stemming from the 2008 financial meltdown.

Victims Stand Against Foreclosure Everywhere is hosting the event to gather support from public officials and to identify and connect victims of foreclosure.

“We still haven’t heard any definitive response to our pleas to legislators to fund programs [for foreclosure victims],” said Penny Dryden, a VSAFE organizer and executive director of the nonprofit Community Housing and Empowerment Connections. “We thought this might make a stronger pitch.”

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Nomura, RBS ‘crap’ emails come into play in $1 billion mortgage bond trial

NEW YORK (Reuters) – In 2007, a Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plcemployee emailed his boss with his view of a sample of mortgages underlying a bond that the bank was underwriting: “This one is crap.”

Asked about it this week in Manhattan federal court, Brian Farrell, the employee, said he did not recall the deal. But a U.S. regulator cited the email as evidence that Nomura Holdings Inc <8604.T> and RBS made false statements about mortgage securities they sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The email and others like it are part of a $1.1 billion lawsuit by the Federal Housing Finance Agency against Nomura and RBS that went to trial this month. The messages add to a litany of arguably embarrassing electronic musings by bank employees that have resurfaced in litigation over the 2008 financial crisis.

Private plaintiffs and U.S. regulators alike have seized upon internal emails from the likes of JPMorgan Chase & Co and Deutsche Bank AG calling the mortgage products they sold investors “lemons,” “junk,” and “pigs.”

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Sen. Warren To Big Banks: ‘Bring It On’

Go Elizabeth!

Law360, New York (March 30, 2015, 9:36 PM ET) — Speaking to a packed house in a New York City bookstore Monday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., responded to reports that America’s unhappily-regulated financial industry was threatening to pull campaign funding from Democrats in Congress by telling the banks to “bring it on.”

In an hourlong appearance to promote the paperback release of her autobiography, “A Fighting Chance,” Warren answered audience questions about the rumor as well as reiterating her stance on the ongoing talks to create a trade agreement between the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific…

Source: Law360

Ex-Wells Fargo Analyst To Settle SEC In-House Trading Case

Law360, New York (March 27, 2015, 5:50 PM ET) — Just days before his scheduled administrative court hearing, a former Wells Fargo analyst has agreed in principle to settle the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s administrative charges he engaged in insider trading by giving one of the firm’s traders early access to his research, according to documents filed Friday.

In a short order, SEC Administrative Law Judge Jason S. Patil agreed to stay the case against Gregory T. Bolan Jr., saying he had received a motion from both parties that they had “reached an agreement in…

Source: Law360

President Obama Vows To Veto Any Republican Bill That Unravels Wall Street Reform

The President said while speaking in Birmingham, AL:

This is just one more way that Wall Street reform, what we passed five years ago, is protecting working families and taxpayers, and that strengthens the economy, and that’s one more why it makes no sense that the Republican budget would make it harder for the CFPB to do its job. And would allow Wall Street to go back to the kind of recklessness that led to the crisis in the first place, and would allow these kinds of lenders who are not doing the right thing to keep at it.

I have to be clear. If Republicans in Congress send me a bill that unravels the reforms we put in place, if they send me a bill that unravels Wall Street reform, I will veto it.

This is not about politics. It’s is about basic values of honesty and fair play. It’s about the basic bargain that says here in America hard work should pay off and responsibility should be rewarded.

New York Regulator Lawsky Proposes SOX-Style Personal Accountability for Anti-Money Laundering, Foreign Asset Compliance

It is, by now, common practice for financial institutions (and other businesses as well) to adopt and maintain comprehensive and costly Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliance programs, to train their employees on AML/OFAC compliance generally and those in-house programs in particular, and periodically to update all of these. In recent remarksdelivered at Columbia Law School, New York Superintendent of Financial Services Benjamin Lawsky decried what he considers to be pervasive compliance shortcomings in this area. Mr. Lawsky proposed that senior executives attest to the adequacy of their institutions’ compliance systems in a manner analogous to Sarbanes-Oxley verifications about the correctness of a public company’s financial statements and the effectiveness of its internal controls. Mr. Lawsky’s proposal, if instituted, would hold individual bank executives personally responsible for their employers’ AML/OFAC compliance system shortcomings.

One can see where Mr. Lawsky is coming from. Recent years have witnessed federal and state fines and civil penalties in the hundreds of millions – and even in some cases billions – for widespread violations of AML and OFAC requirements by financial institutions, predominantly foreign banks. Many of those fines and penalties, as we have previously noted here and here, have been levied by Mr. Lawsky’s own agency, the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS).

Mr. Lawsky does not regard these enormous penalties levied solely against institutions as adequate deterrence, telling the audience at Columbia, “A whack-a-mole approach – simply bringing enforcement actions when we find problems – is not, by itself, enough. Particularly because we believe there are likely widespread problems with transaction monitoring and filtering systems throughout the [financial services] industry.”

As evidence of these “problems,” he pointed to an independent monitor’s finding that a bank had failed to flag literally millions of suspicious transactions. “We basically ran the company’s transactions through our own filtering system and compared the results. This was a new approach. In the past, regulators have largely relied on self-reporting by firms that discover… that banned transactions occurred for some reason. What regulators have not done is actively tested the effectiveness of the filtering systems banks are using. That needs to change.” Thus DFS may also initiate random audits of companies’ AML systems to test whether they are successfully flagging suspicious transactions.

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Foreclosure to Home Free, as 5-Year Clock Expires

MIAMI — In September, Susan Rodolfi celebrated an unusual anniversary: five years of missed mortgage payments.

She is like a ghost of the housing market’s painful past, one of thousands of Americans who have skipped years of mortgage payments and are still living in their homes.

Now a legal quirk could bring a surreal ending to her foreclosure case and many others around the country: They may get to keep their homes without ever having to pay another dime.

The reason, lawyers for homeowners argue, is that the cases have dragged on too long.

There are tens of thousands of homeowners who have missed more than five years of mortgage payments, many of them clustered in states like Florida, New Jersey and New York, where lenders must get judges to sign off on foreclosures.

However, in a growing number of foreclosure cases filed when home prices collapsed during the financial crisis, lenders may never be able to seize the homes because the state statutes of limitations have been exceeded, according to interviews with housing lawyers and a review of state and federal court decisions.

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Australia To Start Taxing Bank Deposits

Zerohedge:

According to Australia’s ABC News, the “Federal Government looks set to introduce a tax on bank deposits in the May budget.”

Ironically, the idea of a bank deposit tax was raised by Labor in 2013 and was criticized by Tony Abbott at the time. Much has changed in two years, and as ABC reports, assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has indicated an announcement on the new tax could be made before the budget.

Mr Frydenberg is a member of the Government’s Expenditure Review Committee but has refused to provide any details.

“Any announcements or decisions around this proposed policy which we discussed at the last election will be made in the lead up or on budget night,” he said.

Speaking at the Victorian Liberal State Council meeting Mr Abbott has repeated his budget message, focusing on families and small businesses.

“There will be tough decisions in this year’s budget as there must be, but there will also be good news.”

For the banks and creditors, yes. For anyone who is still naive enough to save money in the hopes of deferring purchases for the future, not so much.

The banking industry has raised concerns about a deposit tax, saying it will have to pass the cost back onto customers.

Steven Munchenberg from the Australian Bankers’ Association said it would be a damaging move for the Government.

“It’s going to make it harder for banks to raise deposits which are an important way of funding banks. And therefore for us to fund the economy,” he said. “And we also oppose it because particularly at this point in time with low interest rates a lot of people who are relying on their savings for their incomes are already seeing very low returns and this will actually mean they get even less money.”