- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Aaron Nicodemus2024-09-17T18:01:00
Fines for off-channel communications use by employees just keep on coming, with 12 municipal advisory firms fined a total of $1.3 million in the latest Securities and Exchange Commission sweep.
Kaufman Hall & Associates, together with Ponder & Company (which Kaufman Hall acquired in May 2023), drew the biggest fine ($325,000) from the SEC in this enforcement sweep, although it was really one fine that applied to two companies.
PFM Financial Advisors and Specialized Public Finance Inc. were each fined $250,000.
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Regulators continue to hammer firms with fines for violating rules regarding the use of unapproved communication methods by employees, issuing $120 million in fines this week. And for the first time, two firms were not fined because they self-reported their violations.
Six credit rating agencies will pay $49 million in fines to the Securities and Exchange Commission for allowing their employees to communicate on company business using nonapproved communication channels like Whats App and WeChat.
Two regulators doled out more than $477 million in fines on a new group of broker-dealers, investment advisers, and swaps dealers that failed to maintain and preserve the electronic communications of their employees, bringing total such fines issued since 2021 to $3.2 billion.
Generic drug giant Teva Pharmaceuticals has agreed to pay $450 million to settle two cases brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ), including one alleging that co-pays it made on behalf of Medicare patients constituted illegal kickbacks, and a second action for alleged generic drug price fixing.
The Securities and Exchange Commission ordered the owner of Rimar Capital and a board member of its holding company to pay nearly $524,000 in penalties for defrauding investors with false and misleading statements about its use of artificial intelligence.
TD Bank will pay nearly $3.1 billion in penalties to four U.S. regulators to settle charges that it “chose profits over compliance” when it allowed three money laundering networks to filter more than $670 million in dirty money through the company.
