Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has filed yet another lawsuit against Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, charging the firm with disregarding repeated demands to produce documentation having to do with wrongful sharing of information between the company's mutual fund and insurance divisions, the Boston Business Journal reported last week.
Galvin is seeking proof of whether Jared O'Connell, a former employee of the firm's OppenheimerFunds Distributor unit, told his brother-in-law Rex Hampton, who worked at MassMutual, about trading strategies. O'Connell is the son of former MassMutual CEO Robert O'Connell, who himself came under scrutiny and lost his job this past summer when an internal investigation found he had jiggered profits in his retirement account and destroyed files dealing with his son's alleged transgressions. It was that internal investigation that triggered Galvin's probe.
Galvin's case, filed last month in Suffolk Superior Court, charges that the younger O'Connell violated Massachusetts securities law. It also attests that Galvin's latest document requests are more specific and should be honored, particularly in light of the company's cooperation for similar information from other Massachusetts and Connecticut regulators. But MassMutual claims that by asking a judge to impose a subpoena for the firm's internal documents, Galvin is overstepping of his regulatory authority.
(c) 2005 Money Management Executive and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mmexecutive.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
