While private companies are gradually withdrawing from their addiction to risky investments, public pension funds have been slow to follow suit. Following the market’s downturn - which produced about $1 trillion in losses - state and local governments faced a Catch 22 situation: Slash retirement benefits or try to boost returns with high-risk investments.

As it turns out, the latter option is becoming the option of choice for more public pension funds.

“In effect, they’re going to Las Vegas,” said Frederick E. Rowe, a Dallas investor and the former chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, in a March 8 article in the New York Times. “Double up to catch up.”

Among the strategies public pension funds are gambling on with workers’ retirement money: Commodity futures, junk bonds, foreign stocks, deeply discounted mortgage-backed securities and margin investing. Hedge funds, which were once cast aside as an investing strategy, are now gaining favor, as well.

Examples of public pension funds in crisis because of risky investments are not hard to find. Last month, the Atlanta firefighters’ pension fund sued the custodian managing its plan, Chicago-based Northern Trust, accusing it of making several risky investments that could cost the fund millions of dollars.

The lawsuit claims that Northern Trust breached its contract and fiduciary duty with mortgage-backed securities investments - investments that ignored the warnings of the company’s chief economist. The Chicago Public School Teachers’ Pension and Retirement Fund also joined lawsuit, which was filed Jan. 29 in a federal court in Chicago.

Investment giant Morgan Stanley also is the subject of a high-profile case involving pension funds and risky investing strategies. A December 2009 article in the New York Times first reported the story. According to the article, a Virgin Islands pension fund sued Morgan Stanley based on allegations it defrauded investors by marketing $1.2 billion of risky mortgage-related notes that it expected to fail.

The lawsuit, which was filed Dec. 24 in a Manhattan federal court, also accused Morgan Stanley of collaborating with the credit rating agencies Moody’s Investors Services and Standard & Poor’s to obtain AAA ratings for notes sold in 2007 as part of a collateralized debt obligation known as “Libertas.”

Investment firm Morgan Stanley is facing an arbitration claim by the city of Burlington, Vermont, which alleges breaches of fiduciary duty and fraud involving something known as a wrap account. According to the claim, Morgan Stanley’s actions resulted in damages of more than $21 million for the Burlington Employees’ Retirement System - losses that were mainly due to hidden fees and commissions associated with the wrap account Morgan Stanley recommended.

As reported Feb. 11 by Investment News, the city alleges that the fraud occurred from 1981 through 2006 and that the Morgan Stanley employees in charge of its account engaged in a “pay-to-play” scheme. According to the claim, Morgan Stanley selected only managers who funneled a portion of their management fees to the brokerage firm.

In addition, the claim alleges that Morgan Stanley was charging per-trade commissions despite an initial contract that promised free trading. The allegedly excessive fees and mark-ups dramatically reduced the city pension fund’s returns, contributing to the $21 million in losses.

A Feb. 9 article in Forbes (Wrap Account Rip-Off?) highlights the potential drawbacks of wrap accounts. A wrap account is essentially an investment account in which clients are charged a flat percentage of their assets (usually between 1% and 3%) in return for unlimited trading.

Wraps have become an increasingly popular sales product on Wall Street - so popular, in fact, that brokerage firms now have roughly $1.5 trillion in assets under management in them, according to the Forbes article.

Critics, however, say wrap accounts have plenty of pitfalls and may be just as bad - if not worse - as commission-based accounts.

Burlington is asking a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) arbitration panel to order Morgan Stanley to pay the city, its board and the plan actual damages incurred as a result of Morgan Stanley’s alleged misconduct. The claim also is requesting punitive damages.

Morgan Stanley denies all the allegations.

Synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, are complex mortgage-linked debt products that have been blamed for bringing Wall Street to its knees and pummeling millions of investors in the process. It was in the fall of 2007, when the financial markets first started to become unhinged, that these high-risk instruments found their way into the public’s eye.

Today, CDOs are a hot topic on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress and regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are trying to determine exactly how and why synthetic CDOs created the financial tsunami that they did.

As reported Dec. 24 in an article by Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story for the New York Times, regulators are said to be looking at whether current securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by the investment firms and banks that created and sold CDOs and then turned around to bet against clients who purchased them.

“One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded,” the article says.

Pension funds and insurance companies are some of the institutional investors that lost billions of dollars on synthetic CDOs - investments they thought were safe investments.

The New York Times article devotes space mainly to the synthetic collateralized debt obligation business of Goldman Sachs and, specifically, mortgage-related securities called Abacus synthetic CDOs. Abacus CDOs were developed by Goldman trader Jonathan Egol, who had the idea that they would protect Goldman from investment losses if the housing market ever collapsed.

According to the article, when the market did tank, Goldman created even more of these securities, enabling it to pocket huge profits. Meanwhile, clients of Goldman who purchased the CDOs - and who thought they were solid investments - lost big.

One can easily infer from the article and other news reports on the subject that Goldman put the best interests of clients in harm’s way with Abacus because it not only served as the structurer of the deals involving the product, but also held onto the short side of those same deals. In other words, the company would be advising clients to buy assets that, in turn, it was betting to fail.

Goldman certainly is not the only investment firm that employed this strategy. Others banks created similar securities that they sold to clients and then bet against the future performance of those assets.

Goldman and other investment banks will soon have to answer tough questions about accountability and fiduciary duty. In the meetings being held on Capitol Hill, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission - a group that has been compared to the 9/11 Commission - plans to call several panels of investment banks to appear as witnesses. Among them: CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America.

Speaking at the Barclays Capital Global Financial Services Conference on Sept. 15, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit for the first time announced publicly that he anticipates the bank to divest its entire 49% stake in Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC.

New York-based Citigroup has been among the country’s hardest-hit financial institutions from the credit crisis. Over the past 18 months, the struggling bank - which Richard Shelby, R-Ala., referred to in March as a “problem child” - slashed its assets by $500 billion. As a result of ongoing liquidity concerns, Citigroup has borrowed about $45 billion in taxpayer bail-out money through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Citi also continues to face mounting legal and financial woes over its alternative investments, including the ASTA/MAT hedge funds. Currently, the funds are at the center of numerous lawsuits and arbitration claims with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) by investors who allege Citigroup misrepresented the products as safe, conservative and stable fixed-income investments. Any losses were projected to be minimal - no more than 5% a year in the worst-case scenario, according to the company.

Instead, ASTA/MAT plummeted in value last summer because of turmoil in the financial markets and housing markets. During the same time the funds were sinking, however, Citigroup allegedly told investors to “stay the course” and that ASTA/MAT would rebound once the markets stabilized.

That didn’t happen. As it turns out, the ASTA/MAT funds were highly leveraged, borrowing approximately $8 for every $1 raised. Meanwhile, the managers ASTA/MAT continued to invest in some of the most risky and speculative investments possible.

A Portland, Oregon, Financial Industry Regulatory (FINRA) arbitration panel has found Morgan Stanley liable regarding an investor’s claims of making unsuitable investments, misrepresentation and omissions.  

The award, which was rendered on July 24, included nearly $40,000 in compensatory damages plus 9% interest, $39,000 in claimant’s attorney fees and $4,200 in arbitration filing and hearing fees. 

The case is Arbitration No. 08-03307.

In an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Morgan Stanley will pay a $500,000 penalty to settle charges that it misled customers in its Nashville office about various money management firms recommended to clients and from which Morgan Stanley later profited via large commissions. 

Contrary to its disclosures and corporate policies, Morgan Stanley recommended some money managers who were not approved for participation in the firm’s advisory programs and therefore had not been subject to the firm’s due diligence review.

The SEC also charged William Keith Phillips, a former Morgan Stanley investment advisor in Nashville, of steering investors to the unapproved money managers so that he could receive financial kickbacks. The SEC says Phillips’ use of unapproved money managers earned Morgan Stanley at least $3.3 million in extra commissions.

The SEC’s case with Phillips is still pending. 

This isn’t the first time complaints have been lodged against Phillips. As reported July 21 in The Tennessean, Phillips apparently has a lengthy history of previous misconduct accusations, including those from the Chattanooga Pension Fund, the Nashville Electric Service and Metro Nashville Pension Plan. In 2004, the Chattanooga Pension Fund accused him of costing the fund $20 million in losses, undisclosed commissions and fees.

Ultimately, UBS Financial Services, which acquired Phillips’ employer PaineWebber, paid $675,000 to settle the case in 2006, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), according to the article. A much larger payout was made by the Swiss-based bank in 2002 after Metro Nashville complained about the way in which Phillips handled its pension.

UBS paid more than $10 million to settle those issues. UBS also settled with the Nashville Electric Service, agreeing to pay $440,000 for similar accusations levied against Phillips.

Dozens of retirees from Xerox Corp. and Eastman Kodak will soon share in a welcome pay-out after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) ruled investment firm Morgan Stanley must pay $7.2 million to settle charges that two of its brokers wrongly persuaded 90 Rochester, New York, employees to take early retirement. Ultimately, the false promises of big profits and unsuitable investing strategies cost many of the investors their life savings. 

FINRA’s ruling breaks down to $3 million in fines and $4.2 million in restitution to the retirees. In addition, former Morgan Stanley broker Michael Kazacos is permanently barred from the securities industry. The second former Morgan Stanley broker, David Isabella, was charged with misconduct. His case must still go before a three-person FINRA hearing panel. Ira Miller, who managed both Kazacos and Isabella, has been suspended from acting as a supervisor for one year and fined $50,000. 

According to a March 25 statement issued by FINRA, from the years of 1998 to 2003, Kazacos allegedly solicited potential clients from Kodak and Xerox by promising them at least 10% annual returns on their investments with Morgan Stanley. He also reportedly told clients they would be able to keep up their current lifestyles by withdrawing 10% every year and not touch their principal.  

FINRA has charged Isabella with similar misconduct. As reported March 26 by 13WHAM-TV in Rochester, New York, Gerald Miller is one of the individuals who followed Isabella’s advice. Miller, who worked for Xerox, was told by the former Morgan Stanley broker that he would “make him a millionaire in 10 years.” Instead, three years after investing with Isabella, Miller learned that he and his wife needed to drop their 10 percent draw and that they were “going to run out of money in five years.” 

The Millers were later told by Isabella that they might need to sell the lakefront home they previously purchased for their retirement years, according to 13WHAM-TV. 

Other retirees are in the same predicament as the Millers. Some have financial issues, while others are headed toward bankruptcy because they retired too early. 

Morgan Stanley’s settlement with FINRA comes out to approximately $45,000 a person, far below the amount of money many retirees actually lost in the early retirement investment promotion.