Securities Law Blog

The maker of Valvoline motor oil has filed a lawsuit against Oppenheimer & Co., a subsidiary of Oppenheimer Holdings, over the sale of $194 million of auction-rate securities. According to the complaint by Ashland Inc., Oppenheimer misrepresented the liquidity and risks of the instruments at the time it sold them to the chemical company in 2007 and early 2008.

When the market for auction-rate securities collapsed in February 2008, Ashland, like thousands of institutional and retail investors, found itself stranded with an illiquid investment that no one wanted to buy. Several months later, in an effort to settle investigations by state and federal regulators, many Wall Street firms, including Citigroup, UBS and Merrill Lynch, agreed to buy back billions of dollars of auction-rate securities from investors. Oppenheimer, however, opted not to participate in the ARS buy-back programs, contending it didn’t issue or underwrite the securities but only sold them.

In November 2008, Massachusetts’ Secretary of State William Galvin sued Oppenheimer, charging the firm with fraud and dishonest and unethical conduct in connection to its auction-rate securities business. Galvin not only wanted Oppenheimer to rescind all sales of auction-rate securities at par and make full restitution to investors who already had sold their securities but also sought to revoke Oppenheimer Chairman and CEO Albert Lowenthal’s Massachusetts registration as a broker-dealer agent of Oppenheimer, as well as fine the company and several senior-level executives.

Ashland filed its lawsuit against Oppenheimer on April 17,2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.