Practice

Five independent fund trustees have won a small victory in a lawsuit originally filed against them as well as Investment Adviser's, Inc., the mutual fund adviser in Minneapolis, Minn., and the IAI Value Fund. Investment Adviser's is a subsidiary of Lloyds TSB of London.

Independent mutual fund directors must provide more information about themselves and, in some cases, their families but also stand to receive valuable protection if the SEC eventually adopts new and revised rules and guidelines that the agency proposed last week.

The Social Security Administration has begun mailing retirement benefit statements to all working Americans - an event that is bound to unnerve individuals ill-prepared for retirement and create tremendous sales opportunities for mutual funds, according to industry executives.

A nasty proxy fight should draw closer to a conclusion Friday when the shareholders of the closed-end Portugal Fund vote on a series of proposals which could convert the fund to an open-end structure and give closed-end fund activist Ronald Olin a seat on the fund's board of directors.

Auditors of mutual funds may shortly have new guidelines for when personal investments in mutual funds are permissible.

The former chief investment officer for Mitchell Hutchins Asset Management of New York has agreed to pay $10,000 to settle SEC charges that she failed adequately to supervise a portfolio manager's investment and securities pricing practices.

Retirement is the main reason people save and invest in only three of ten leading nations - in the U.S., Germany and the U.K., according to a survey commissioned by American Express of Minneapolis, Minn. People in France, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore and Taiwan save money to have a cushion in case of an emergency, particularly in case of being laid off from their jobs.

Most employers are outsourcing their retirement plans, but a large number are not paying much attention to how well their plans are being managed for them, according to a study completed this summer for Delaware Investments of Philadelphia by Greenwald & Associates of Washington, D.C. It may be because of the bull market, according to one Delaware executive.

Only six percent of 401(k) plan participants who switch jobs roll their money over to the incumbent 401(k) provider, according to a study. Thirty-seven percent of participants place their savings in an IRA, according to the study by Hewitt Associates, the management consulting firm in Lincolnshire, Ill. Hewitt's analysis of 193,000 defined contribution distributions nationwide in 1998 also showed that 57 percent of the investors chose to cash out of their plans.

Charles F. Parisi, a California financial services executive, allegedly worked with his brother and a colleague to dupe fund board members, insurance companies and portfolio managers about Parisi's troubled past and conceal Parisi's role in a firm which managed a trust used in variable annuities, the SEC alleged last week.