Securities Lawyers Blog
According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Matthew Katke (Katke) recently waived his right to indictment and pleaded guilty today in Hartford federal court to participating in a multimillion securities fraud scheme. Katke was registered with RBS Securities, Inc. (RBS Securities), during the time of the DOJ’s investigation. Currently, Katke is associated with Nomura Securities International, Inc. and has been since August 2013.
According to the DOJ, Katke also entered into an agreement to cooperate in the government’s ongoing investigation. Allegedly, between April 2008 and August 2013, Katke was a managing director at RBS Securities, a global securities firm with headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. Katke and other members of RBS’s Asset Backed Products division traded fixed income investment securities in residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) through RBS trading floor. Katke admitted in his guilty plea that he and others conspired to increase RBS’s profits on CLO bond trades at the expense of their own customers by, among other things, making misrepresentations to induce customers to pay inflated prices and selling customers to accept deflated prices for CLO bonds. Katke misrepresented the CLO seller’s asking price to the buyer and kept the difference between the price paid by the buyer and the price paid to the seller for RBS. In another device used by Katke he misrepresented to the CLO buyer that bonds were held in RBS’s inventory were being offered for sale by a fictitious third-party seller invented by Katke allowing Katke to charge extra commission.
The DOJ’s investigation revealed many fraudulent transactions that cost at least 20 victim millions of dollars. In a statement U.S. Attorney Deirdre M. Daly of the District of Connecticut said that “Broker-dealers, and the people who work for them, need to understand that a market practice that is at odds with the securities law is a crime that carries serious repercussions. We urge others to follow Mr. Katke’s example and cooperate with investigators. We want to thank SIGTARP and the FBI for their efforts to date in this continuing investigation. Additionally, we acknowledge our other partners at the Department of Labor Office of the Inspector General, the Federal Housing Finance Administration Office of Inspector General and the Fraud Section of the Department of Justice for their hard work in the numerous ongoing investigations into this market.”