Special Program Root Tag

Six chief executive officers have stepped down or been fired since the mutual fund scandal began last September. However, the way many have gone has been a puzzling, agonizing and laborious process, raising accountability questions that start at the top and seep down to the bottom, Reuters reports.

Despite admitting it would take a $60 million pretax charge to pay for improper trade-related costs, Franklin Resources, manager of Templeton’s mutual funds, announced a 58% profit for the quarter.

A division of Fiserv Inc. is being investigated for possible improper mutual fund trading practices, the company’s chief executive said Thursday, the Associated Press reports.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on Thursday subpoenaed insurance broker Aon Corporation as part of an investigation into whether fees and commissions paid to brokers by insurance firms as an incentive to sell their products is a legitimate business practice. Two other insurers, Marsh & McClennan and Willis Group, also received subpoenas from Spitzer’s office.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation will amend two fund services in order to more accurately track the use of breakpoints, the company announced. In a partnership with NewRiver, the DTCC has become the first organization to address the problems in distribution of breakpoint discounts, which have allegedly not been given out as promised by many companies.

Four months after being reorganized into a separate unit, Wachovia Corp's trust group plans to cross-sell its products and services down-market to mass-affluent customers of the parent bank and its brokerage unit.

BOSTON -- "Stop congratulating yourself."

The corporate makeover at Janus Capital continued last week as CEO Mark Whiston, 42, quit and was replaced by board chairman Steve Scheid, 50.

A total of 33 new hedge funds have been registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past 12 months. Eight new hedge funds have been registered so far this year, including new offerings from J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch, both of New York.

The $675 million price tag agreed to by Bank of America and FleetBoston to settle charges in the mutual fund scandal was extremely high, but the companies agreed that expeditious handling of the charges was paramount to closing their merger, the vice chairman of BoA said in a recent CNBC interview.

Standard & Poor's last week introduced the separately managed account (SMA) Evaluator, a joint venture with tech company Prima Capital that will act similarly to S&P's mutual fund research tools.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is facing a class-action lawsuit in relation to the market timing scandal battering the mutual fund industry. The suit, filed by New York law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, claims CIBC facilitated the illegal late trading conducted by MFS and helped defraud investors. It spans from 2001 to 2003. Also named in the suit is Paul Flynn, the former CIBC managing director of equity investment accused of providing financing for hedge funds that engaged in the late trading and timing activities. CIBC has yet to file a statement of defense.

Asset management industry merger and acquisition activity picked up significantly in 2003, but the size and scope of the deals plummeted, in part, due to concerns arising from the scandal engulfing the fund industry, according to a recent study released by Putnam Lovell NBF Securities of New York.

Jeff Etheredge to Manage Distribution at Integrity

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson told the Investment Counsel Association of America Thursday that the Commission is considering alternatives to its hard 4 p.m. close proposal.

The Department of Labor has launched its own investigation into the market-timing policies and commission schedules of an unnamed group of large mutual fund provides to determine whether any of these practices have harmed employee-benefit plan participants, Dow Jones Newswires reports.

Mutual fund companies living by the adage "out of sight, out of mind" are stepping up efforts to fend off industry reforms as media coverage of the far-reaching scandals gradually diminishes, USA Today attests in its editorial pages.

Annuity sales through banks rose 7% in February compared with the previous month, and the $3.6 billion of sales was the most since October, a monthly survey reported.

Despite falling behind early to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s cffice, the Securities and Exchange Commission has gained its war footing against unethical mutual fund companies, a new General Accounting Office report says.

Marsh & McLennan, the world’s top insurance broker and the parent company of No. 6 mutual fund company Putnam Investments, saw an 83-cents-per-share profit for the first quarter to $446 million, up from 81 cents a share and $443 million last year.