Law and legal issues

A judge’s decision puts new pressure on the brokerage industry watchdog and the SEC.

The Federal Trade Commission recently issued an advisory opinion that could make it easier for consumers to recover their legal costs from banks in situations where they were defrauded by a car dealer.

The U.S. Treasury Department defeated a blue-state challenge to a rule that exempts buyers of high-interest loans from state interest rate caps.

R. David Yost and his soon-to-be-former son-in-law are slugging it out in court over allegations of tax evasion.

The wirehouse and its attorney “manipulated the arbitrator selection process” and “introduced perjured testimony,” according to the ruling.

A Citigroup employee says she provided U.S. regulators with information that led to the bank's paying a $400 million fine. Now, she wants the judge to award her a share of the penalty.

The CEO of Hong Kong's securities regulator said the bank's failures "exposed a culture that encouraged chasing revenue at the expense of basic standards of honesty."

Tesla countersued JPMorgan Chase over a suit the bank filed last year seeking a $162 million payment related to a series of stock warrant transactions.

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors abandoned a lawsuit against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that had challenged the San Francisco fintech's effort to become a national bank without deposit insurance. The company recently amended its application to drop that controversial element.

Under an agreement with 40 state attorneys general, the student lender and servicer agreed to cancel debt for over 66,000 borrowers and pay restitution to another 350,000 borrowers placed in certain types of forbearance.

The payout will help the Delaware bank recover legal costs that stemmed from its 2010 purchase of Christiana Bank & Trust. It expects a 23-cent boost to earnings per share in the most recently completed quarter.

Two co-founders of the company are expected to give depositions this month in a suit brought by an entrepreneur who says one of them stole her idea of providing credit to immigrants and turned it into a multimillion-dollar venture. Petal denies the allegations.

Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $60 million to settle a class action suit by consumers claiming the firm failed to safeguard their personal information.

Shares of Medallion Financial plunged Wednesday after U.S. regulators accused the New York-based lender to taxi drivers of seeking to illegally boost its stock price amid intense competition from Uber Technologies and Lyft. 

Germany’s finance watchdog fined Deutsche Bank 8.66 million euros ($9.8 million) over its handling of submissions for Euribor, a reference rate at the heart of a scandal that rocked the industry.

Capital One Financial agreed to pay $190 million to settle a class action filed against it after a hacker broke into its cloud computing systems and stole their personal information.

Standard Chartered has been handed a record fine by the U.K.’s top banking regulator after a spreadsheet error resulted in the emerging markets-focused lender overestimating its access to U.S. dollar funding.

JPMorgan Chase executives were supposed to make sure employee communications were archived for regulatory scrutiny. But for years, even the bosses were using their mobile phones to tap out work-related messages — a practice so pervasive that U.S. authorities dropped the hammer Friday, imposing $200 million in fines.

The Financial Conduct Authority has fined a U.K. unit of HSBC Holdings 64 million pounds ($85 million) after finding “serious weaknesses” in the automated processes it used to monitor suspicious transactions, the latest example of the watchdog’s increasingly assertive stance against the firms it regulates.

JPMorgan Chase is preparing to pay roughly $200 million to resolve U.S. regulatory investigations into lapses over monitoring employee communications.