BNY Mellon, TD and Jefferies have each settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after the agency found the banks failed to comply with disclosure requirements concerning municipal bond offerings, the SEC said Tuesday.
As part of the settlement, BNY Mellon will pay a $300,000 penalty and nearly $657,000 in disgorgement, plus prejudgment interest. TD and Jefferies, meanwhile, will each pay a $100,000 penalty and roughly $53,000 and $43,000, respectively, in disgorgement and interest.
The SEC also charged financial services firm Oppenheimer with the same violations on 354 offerings but also filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging the company made deceptive statements. The complaint seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement plus prejudgment interest, and a civil money penalty, the SEC said.
"We encourage underwriters to examine their practices and to self-report any failures to us before we identify them ourselves,” Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s division of enforcement, said in a statement Tuesday, noting the regulator’s first action in the municipal bond space.
The four finance firms neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s findings. The regulator alleges the companies, from 2017 onward, sold new-issue municipal bonds without obtaining required disclosures for investors. Each cited a limited offering exemption but did not fulfill the exemption’s criteria, the SEC said.
The findings prompted the SEC to launch investigations into other companies’ reliance on limited offering exemptions, the regulator said.
