In May, Marilyn Hazell won a $400,000 Finra arbitration claim against Peak Securities Corp., claiming breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, negligence and fraud stemming from the purchase of notes offered by Medical Provider Funding Corp. VI.

Those notes are at the center of a Securities and Exchange Commission fraud complaint issued last summer. The SEC charged Medical Capital Holdings Inc., the parent company of the issuer, with fraud in the sale of $77 million in notes. Dozens of independent broker-dealers sold the notes.

A scan of the Finra database of a...

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The latest cycle of investment fraud cases, unlike the tech-wreck cases of 2000 and 2001, has hit mostly otherwise conservative investors seeking safety and income.

This is the latest fall out resulting from Wall Street’s manufacturing and sale of synthetic investment products, CDOs, structured products, proprietary closed end funds, and multi-billion dollar underwritings of the preferred securities of troubled financial institutions.

However, most investor...

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The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced today that it has ordered Los Angeles-based Westpark Capital, Inc. to pay a total of $400,000 for supervisory system failures, and has suspended two officers for failing to supervise brokers in two now-closed Long Island branches who churned customer accounts and engaged in unauthorized and unsuitable trading in multiple accounts. The monetary sanction includes a $100,000 fine and $300,000 in restitution to affected customers.

 FINRA suspended Westpark's former Chief Compliance Officer, William A. Morgan, f...

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 Judges, and not arbitrators, should decide questions relating to the enforceability of a class action waiver in an arbitration clause because such questions present issues of "arbitrability" that are properly decided by courts, an en banc panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

"An unconscionability challenge to the provisions of an arbitration agreement is a question of arbitrability that is presumptively for the court, not the arbitrator<...

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