Two individual investors just scored a remarkable win against Citigroup. A few weeks ago, the pair was awarded a total of $54.1 million in a securities arbitration case against the Smith Barney unit of the company – the largest amount ever awarded to individuals in such a case, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
This legal dust-up involved supposedly conservative municipal bond investments that Smith Barney had peddled to its wealthiest clients. The investments, which were big money-makers for Smith Barney, turned out to be anything but safe for the firm’s clients: various portfolios lost between half and three-quarters of their value during the financial crisis.
Arbitrators rarely, if ever, discuss such cases, and the materials turned over by both sides are kept under wraps. But the outsize award, which included $17 million in punitive damages, is not the only thing that is noteworthy. The arbitrators appeared to reject – resoundingly – three defenses that Wall Street often employs when clients sue:
No. 1: We didn’t blow up your portfolio. The financial crisis did.
No. 2: If you’re wealthy and sophisticated, you should have understood the risks.
And, No. 3, the most common defense of all: The prospectus warned that you could lose your shirt, so don’t come crying to us if you do.
The investors who prevailed here are Gerald D. Hosier, 69, a wildly successful intellectual-property lawyer, and Jerry Murdock Jr., 52, a prosperous venture capitalist. Mr. Hosier and a trust he set up for his adult children received $48 million. Mr. Murdock got about $6 million.
The men, neighbors in Aspen, Colo., suffered $27 million in out-of-pocket losses on their investments. The big clunker was a municipal bond arbitrage strategy that their Smith Barney broker had characterized as safe, according to the men’s complaint. The deal was supposedly designed to eke out more income than a simple portfolio of bonds would generate.
Not only did the men recover all their losses in the award, they also received damages. Mr. Hosier was awarded $15 million in punitive damages and $6.3 million in market-adjusted damages. The arbitrators also awarded $3 million for the men’s legal fees.
Alexander Samuelson, a Citigroup spokesman, said: “We are disappointed with the decision, which we believe is not supported by the facts or law.” He noted that the bank had won a number of arbitrations involving such leveraged municipal bond strategies and said that the bank was considering its legal options in this case.
Mr. Hosier invested in the bank’s municipal arbitrage strategy from 2002 through 2007. Requiring a minimum investment of $500,000, the deals employed the wonders of leverage, borrowing 8 to 10 times the value of the municipal bonds in an underlying portfolio to generate higher income. Calling the strategy conservative and ideal for investors’ safe money, Smith Barney sold the trusts to wealthy investors.
But Smith Barney and its brokers were the prime beneficiaries of the strategy, which generated fees not only on the money that had been borrowed to juice the returns but also through the life of the investment. Clients paid 0.35 percent annually on the portfolios, plus a fee of 20 percent of all income earned by the investors above a 5.5 percent threshold each year.
Smith Barney’s sales representatives kept 40 percent of the total fees paid by their investors, far exceeding what they would have earned selling ordinary municipal bonds. This arrangement encouraged Smith Barney to lever up the portfolios, Mr. Hosier’s lawyers argued, putting the interests of their clients and those of Smith Barney at odds.
Investors who bought these deals agreed to lock up their money for two years and had to pay a substantial fee if they redeemed their holdings during the next three years.
Mr. Hosier was the single biggest buyer of Smith Barney’s municipal arbitrage deals, with $26 million invested over time. But four different portfolios in which he invested raised almost $2 billion from all investors. All of the portfolios performed badly.
“Citigroup mismarketed this product to high-net-worth investors as an alternative to municipal bonds with a slightly higher return,” said a Beverly Hills, Calif. lawyer who represented Mr. Hosier and Mr. Murdock. “Our clients never knowingly agreed to risk a significant loss of principal for a few extra points of interest.”
As for Citigroup’s three defenses, the attorneys, demonstrated that municipal bonds did not suffer catastrophic losses during the period. This squelched the bank’s argument that the financial crisis did in the strategy.
Regarding their clients’ sophistication and wealth, the lawyers agreed that both men were comfortable taking risks in certain circumstances, but not with the money they had given to the bank. “Citigroup misled their wealthiest clients and then tried to blame them for relying on what they were told,” Mr. Caruso said.
Arguing that the risks were laid out in the prospectus also seems to have run into a stone wall. Mr. Hosier’s lawyers produced seven different notices on the topic published by Finra and its predecessor regulator since 1994, including a notice from 2009 that states: “Providing risk disclosure in a prospectus or product description does not cure otherwise deficient disclosure in sales material, even if such sales material is accompanied or preceded by the prospectus.”
Mr. Hosier’s victory is particularly noteworthy, given the nominal amounts typically extracted by regulators in cases against major banks. The punitive damages awarded to Mr. Hosier, for example, are more than triple the $4.45 million penalty levied against Wachovia Securities by the Securities and Exchange Commission this month in a suit that the S.E.C. settled with the bank. The S.E.C. accused the bank of selling about $10 million of mortgage-related securities to investors at above-market prices and at excessive markups. Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in the settlement.
The arbitrators in Mr. Hosier’s case seemed keen to hold Wall Street accountable. And his win against Citigroup does not appear to be an anomaly. Since April 2010, his lawyers have argued 16 other arbitrations involving the same type of investment and won every one.
In an interview, Mr. Hosier said the experience had opened his eyes to the disturbing ways of Wall Street.
“Instead of the financial world being the lubricant for business, they are out there manufacturing products with no utility whatsoever except for generating fees,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do something about Wall Street. It is destroying the country.”