Washington

The Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement action against 13 dealer firms Monday represents a broad commission effort to correct behavior that was probably due to mistakes by individual traders dealing with an unusual bond issuance, attorneys and market participants said Tuesday.

Former Miami, Fla. budget director Michael Boudreaux is seeking a rehearing before a full federal court of appeals after a three-judge panel earlier this year denied his claim of immunity from a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit.

The Securities and Exchange Commission today sanctioned 13 firms for improperly selling Puerto Rico bonds in denominations below a $100,000 minimum denomination set in a $3.5 billion offering earlier this year.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board will seek Securities and Exchange Commission approval of its proposal to extend its pay-to-play rule to include municipal advisors as well as changes to post-trade disclosure requirements.

The Bond Dealers of America is suggesting a change to the way dealers would get affirmations from sophisticated municipal market professionals under the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board's proposed amendments to its rule governing interactions with those market participants to whom dealers owe fewer duties.

Claims against UBS from Puerto Rican investors have surged to $900 million, the group said Tuesday in its third-quarter earnings report.

Convicted bid-riggers Peter Ghavami, Michael Welty, and Gary Heinz are urging a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court's decision on the basis of an expired statute of limitations, improper testimony, and other alleged errors in their earlier trial, but the federal government is arguing the lower court was correct to punish the former UBS AG executives.

Though the municipal market has recently been focused on primary market disclosure compliance, dealers should expect the Securities and Exchange Commission to start policing the secondary market just as diligently, former SEC enforcement lawyer Peter Chan told The Bond Buyer.

The Securities and Exchange Commission needs to remove regulatory impediments to the development of electronic trading platforms for the fixed income market and work to avoid a looming “liquidity cliff,” commissioner Daniel Gallagher said Friday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission granted approval Friday of a rule establishing supervisory requirements for municipal advisors, the first new Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board MA rule to get the nod since the SEC's registration regime was adopted last year.