The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today charged registered broker-dealer BMO Capital Markets Corp. with failing to supervise employees who, from December 2020 until May 2023, sold mortgage-backed bonds using offering sheets and bond metrics that were misleading and did not accurately describe the characteristics of the collateral backing the bonds.
To settle the charges, BMO agreed to pay more than $40 million in disgorgement, prejudgment interest, and a civil penalty.
According to the SEC’s order, BMO representatives structured mixed collateral bonds backed by pools of residential mortgages, using a small sliver of higher-interest mortgages, in a way that caused the systems of third-party data providers to generate inaccurate information about the bonds’ overall composition. BMO then sent misleading metrics about the bonds to customers, even though its representatives should have known they were misleading.
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