Law and legal issues

Banking groups that sued the state of Illinois over its law barring banks from charging interchange fees on taxes and tips cheered an appeals court ruling remanding the law to a lower court and vowed to keep the law going into effect, which is slated for July 1.

The Securities and Exchange Commission initially offered $179.5 million to Michael Bacon, who provided key information to the government about Wells Fargo's fake-accounts scandal. But shortly after SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins took office, the amount was sharply reduced.

An April 20 bankruptcy filing accuses Kfir Gavrieli of recruiting friends, family and his synagogue to sign sham contracts that inflated Aspiration's revenue.

Plaintiffs say Team 313 stole Social Security numbers and IDs. Chime says no data left its systems. None of the suits has its own evidence.

The litigants, with some of the industry's deepest pockets, may be filing the rare cases to flag and potentially punish bad brokers, one expert said.

San Diego County Credit Union won a court ruling that should help in its effort to get out of its deal to merge with a local competitor. A lawyer for SDCCU said he believes the judge's decision "signals the end of any merger between the two institutions."

The case exposes a systemic risk for banks: incident-response and ransomware-negotiation firms receive sensitive breach details that a corrupted insider can sell back to the attackers.

As judges have shown in other recent cases involving UBS and Stifel, firms have a high bar to clear if they want an arbitration award vacated.

New York extracted $5 million and a broker registration from Uphold over its promotion of CredEarn, a yield product whose issuer collapsed in 2020.

A federal judge harshly criticized the settlement of a civil suit between the Department of Justice and a Texas land developer.

Plaintiffs allege the banks failed to safeguard names, Social Security numbers and account data after a breach at a vendor neither bank has named.

A federal judge finds that the embattled brokerage Alpine Securities' argument that FINRA should answer to the federal executive branch amounts to " wishful thinking" that "collapses under the weight of spiraling aspiration."

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued an interim final rule Friday to clarify banks' leeway to charge interchange fees, explicitly blocking the applicability of a law passed in Illinois that would ban charging interchange fees on taxes and tips that goes into effect in July.

Bankruptcy filings rose 11.9% during the past 12 months, according to statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; JPMorganChase named Jerry Lee and Nick Richitt as global co-heads of health care investment banking; Goldman Sachs appointed Akila Raman as global head of its private and alternatives capital markets business; and more in this week's banking news roundup.

A California man's complaint alleges that Morgan Stanley's website enabled tracking tech from Google and Microsoft to collect web visitors' browsing data for targeted online ads.

James filed a pair of lawsuits against Coinbase and Gemini arguing that they violated New York's sports gambling laws.

Some litigants are "knuckleheads" but others are real threats, and well-pleaded cases can easily cost companies millions of dollars, TCPA attorney Eric Troutman said.

A federal judge refused to sign a settlement agreement between the Department of Justice and Houston developer Colony Ridge because it failed to provide any consumer relief. DOJ agreed to an out-of-court settlement instead.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has dismissed scores of enforcement attorneys early in President Donald Trump's second term, is staffing up its litigation arm in anticipation of defending its rules in court.

Former Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles, who served during President Trump's first term, said members of the Fed board should be removable by the president, but that the decentralized structure of the Fed will ensure that monetary policy decisions remain sound.