Practice

The Securities and Exchange Commission has shut down two illegally run mutual funds and the FBI seized records and data from the Linville Group, the company that ran the funds, according to a SEC official.

BOSTON - Increasingly, competing in the retirement market requires plan providers to offer more than products, according to industry executives. Providers need to market a variety of services to plan sponsors and their participants and provide guidance and information on issues that may not relate directly to investment products, executives said.

A district court judge in Connecticut issued an emergency order earlier this month freezing the assets of Ian Renert and Hawthorne Sterling & Company, an unregistered investment adviser in Wilton, Conn., according to the SEC.

Putnam Investment Management of Boston has settled a lawsuit brought against the firm's top executives as well as its mutual fund trustees by The Commerce Group, an insurance holding company in Webster, Mass.

Although the 401(k) market appears saturated and assets shrank in 2000, new legislation recently passed in Congress should bring in new assets, requiring fund companies to double their efforts at marketing to plan sponsors, according to analysts in the retirement industry.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Securities and Exchange Commission may drop a new rule requiring funds to report after-tax performance figures if a proposal to allow investors to defer a portion of capital gains taxes on their fund investments becomes law, said Paul Roye, director of the SEC's division of investment management.

Washington, D.C. - The possibility that actively-managed exchange-traded funds could cause market volatility is one of the issues to be addressed in a concept release' that the Securities and Exchange Commission expects to issue in the next few months, according to Paul Roye, director of the SEC's division of investment management. Roye discussed the SEC's active exchange-traded fund concept release at the general meeting of the Investment Company Institute of Washington D.C. here earlier this month.

A lot of Americans are looking at the short-term when it comes to their retirement plan balances. Thirty percent of investors who faced a choice about their plan balances, either because of leaving a job or retiring, said they took a cash payment, according to a recent study by Putnam Investments of Boston.

New rules issued last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining bank exemptions to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act may have important implications for the fund industry, particularly for no-load fund fees.

A no-action letter issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month gives some evidence of how the SEC views affiliated transactions with regard to fund companies, according to Alan Rosenblat, a lawyer with Dechert of Philadelphia. The issue of affiliated transactions is one the Investment Company Institute of Washington D.C. has sought guidance on from the SEC for some time, according to Rosenblat.