JPMorgan Accused of Breaking Its Duty to Clients

In the summer of 2007, as the first tremors of the coming financial crisis were being felt on Wall Street, top executives of JPMorgan Chase were raising red flags about a troubled investment vehicle called Sigma, which was based in London. But the bank chose not to move out $500 million in client assets that it had put into Sigma two months earlier.

Sigma collapsed a year later. Now, new documents unsealed late last month as part of a lawsuit by bank clients against JPMorgan show for the first time just how high the warnings about Sigma went — all the way to the office of the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon.

While the clients lost nearly all their money, JPMorgan collected nearly $1.9 billion from Sigma’s demise, according to the suit. That’s because as Sigma’s troubles worsened, JPMorgan lent the vehicle billions of dollars and received valuable assets in the form of a security deposit.

After Sigma came undone in September 2008, many of those assets ultimately became JPMorgan’s and eventually appreciated in value, giving the bank a large profit, the suit says.

The case, which is filed as a class action and includes several pension funds as named plaintiffs, accuses JPMorgan of breaching its responsibility to keep its clients in safe investments, and it sheds new light on one of Wall Street’s oldest problems — whether banks treat their clients’ money with the same care that they treat their own.

Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan, called some of the suit’s accusations “ludicrous” and said the bank lent more than $8 billion to Sigma to try to help the vehicle survive, not to profit from its failure. He said the bank did its best to protect its clients’ money and that its dealings with Sigma were to the clients’ benefit.

The suit, however, asserts that JPMorgan workers developed a “grand scheme” to profit from Sigma in the event of a collapse, even though employees at another part of the bank left client money invested in the vehicle.

One internal e-mail between top executives, for instance, states that the firm needed to protect its own interests in its dealings with Sigma, without taking into account the clients’ position. The suit also contends that the bank’s loans to Sigma gave it access to the vehicle’s best assets, at a discount, which proved to be a profitable trade for the bank.

JPMorgan has said in a court filing that no such scheme existed and that it acted properly in the way it managed client money.

The bank argues that by law, different units of the company that dealt with Sigma could not share information, because of so-called Chinese walls, which are meant to prevent the spread of nonpublic information within the firm. According to this argument, the unit that invested client money in Sigma could not confer with the arm that lent the vehicle money.

But because the information rose to executives who oversee the entire company and were in a position to intervene, analysts say the issue is trickier.

“In one sense, I don’t think it’s good enough to say, ‘We’re a large organization, we can’t relay information.’ That, in many respects, is a cop-out,” said William Fitzpatrick, a banking analyst at Manulife Asset Management, a Canadian insurance company that is not party to the case. “Does Jamie Dimon have some sort of veto power where he can overrule it? That gets very gray.”

But he added, “I can see where the banks would come back and say, ‘The Chinese walls are there for a reason. We don’t want to put in manual overrides.’ ”

In many cases, the rules and practices banks follow are based on nonpublic information they receive.

It’s not as clear what a bank’s obligations are with insights that are based on public information, like some of the information related to Sigma.

Within the financial services industry, the case is being closely watched. A victory by JPMorgan’s clients may mean that banks will have to be more careful about deciding whether to share — or silo — information that affects their clients’ investments. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a prominent trade group, wrote a brief in support of JPMorgan last month saying that the pension funds that are suing had an “unprecedented and novel theory” that “contradicts decades of Congressional and regulatory guidance.” The trade group said that if the plaintiffs won, it would impose greater costs on banks.

Whatever the legal outcome, the new documents paint a picture of how one of Wall Street’s strongest players profited in its deals with the weak.