Morgan Asset Management, Inc., Morgan Keegan & Company, Inc., James C. Kelsoe, Jr. and Joseph Thompson Weller, CPA.

Securities Fraud and Misrepresentation FINRA Arbitration and Litigation Attorney, Russell L. Forkey, Esq.

June 25, 2011:

Approximately, 39,000 investors lose $1.5 billion dollars.

Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it had agreed to accept a settlement proposed by Morgan Asset Management, Inc., Morgan Keegan & Company, Inc., James C. Kelsoe, Jr., and Joseph Thompson Weller in an administrative action brought by the SEC relating to, among other things, the following funds:

  • RKM Advantage Income Fund, Inc. n/k/a the Helios Advantage Income Fund, Inc.
  • RKM High Income Fund, Inc. n/k/a the Helios High Income Fund, Inc.
  • RKM Multi-Sector High Income Fund, Inc. n/k/a Helios Multi-Sector High Income Fund, Inc.
  • Morgan Keegan Select Fund, Inc. n/k/a Helios Select Income Fund, Inc.
  • RKM Strategic Income Fund, Inc. n/k/a the Helios Strategic Income Fund, Inc.

The type of conducted which contributed to the losses outlined above can be gleaned from the SEC’s Corrected Order Making Findings Imposing Remedial Sanctions and Cease and deist Order, which can be found by following the highlighted link.  Some of these findings are set forth below.

Each of the Funds held, in varying amounts, securities backed by subprime mortgages, and the market for such securities deteriorated in the first half of 2007. Morgan Keegan utilized practices which were not reasonably designed to determine that the Funds’ NAVs were accurate. Morgan Asset, through Kelsoe, engaged in actions that forestalled declines in the NAVs of the Funds that would have occurred as a result of the deteriorating market, absent his intervention.

Many of the securities that were held by the Funds and backed by subprime mortgages lacked readily available market quotations and, as a result, were required by the Investment Company Act to be priced by the Funds’ Boards of Directors, using “fair value” methods. Under Section 2(a)(41)(B) of the Investment Company Act, the Funds were required to use market values for portfolio securities with readily available market quotations and use fair value for all other portfolio assets, as determined in good faith by the board of directors. The fair value of securities for which market quotations are not readily available is the price the Funds would reasonably expect to receive on a current sale of the securities.

The Funds adopted valuation procedures for pricing the Funds’ portfolio securities and assigned the task of following those procedures to Morgan Keegan. The Funds’ valuation procedures for fair-valued securities mandated that such securities should be valued in “good faith” by the Valuation Committee, considering a series of general and specific factors including, among others, “fundamental analytical data relating to the investment,” “an evaluation of the forces which influence the market in which the securities are purchased or sold” and “events affecting the security.” The procedures required the Valuation Committee to maintain a written report “documenting the manner in which the fair value of a security was determined and the accuracy of the valuation made based on the next reliable public price quotation for that security.” The procedures also required that values assigned to securities be periodically validated through, among other means, broker-dealer price confirmations. Fund Accounting also used broker-dealer price confirmations to set current values. The procedures specified that prices obtained from a broker-dealer could only be overridden when there was “a reasonable basis to believe that the price provided [did] not accurately reflect the fair value of the portfolio security.” Whenever a price was overridden, the procedures mandated the basis for overriding the price to be “documented and provided to the Valuation Committee for its review.”

In filings with the Commission, the Funds stated that the fair value of securities would be determined by Morgan Asset’s Valuation Committee using procedures adopted by the Funds’ board of directors. In fact, the responsibility was delegated to Morgan Keegan, which primarily staffed the Valuation Committee. Morgan Keegan and the Valuation Committee did not reasonably satisfy their responsibilities under the Funds’ procedures in several ways. Among other things: (i) the Valuation Committee left pricing decisions to lower level employees in Fund Accounting who did not have the training or qualifications to make fair value pricing determinations; (ii) Fund Accounting personnel relied on Kelsoe’s “price adjustments” to determine the prices assigned to portfolio assets, without obtaining a reasonable basis for or documentation supporting the price adjustments or applying the factors set forth in the procedures; (iii) Fund Accounting personnel gave Kelsoe discretion beyond the parameters of the valuation procedures in validating the prices of portfolio securities by allowing him to determine which dealer price confirmations to use and which to ignore, without obtaining documentation to support his adjustments; and (iv) the Valuation Committee and Fund Accounting did not ensure that the fair value prices assigned to many of the portfolio securities were periodically re-evaluated, allowing them to be carried at stale values for months at a time.

Morgan Asset adopted its own procedures to determine the actual fair value to assign to portfolio securities and to “validate” those values “periodically.” Among other things, those procedures provided that “[q]utterly reports listing all securities held by the Funds that were fair valued during the quarter under review, along with explanatory notes for the fair values assigned to the securities, shall be presented to the Board for its review.” Morgan Asset failed to fully implement this provision of its pricing policy.

At various times between January 2007 and July 2007, Kelsoe had his assistant send “price adjustments” to Fund Accounting. The adjustments were communications by Kelsoe to Fund Accounting concerning the values of specific portfolio securities. In many instances, these adjustments were arbitrary and did not reflect fair value. The price adjustments were routinely entered upon receipt by the staff accountant into a spreadsheet used to calculate the NAVs of the Funds.

Fund Accounting did not generally request, and Kelsoe did not generally supply, supporting documentation for his price adjustments. Fund Accounting and the Funds did not record which securities had been assigned values by Kelsoe.

As part of the Funds’ valuation procedures, Fund Accounting sometimes requested third party broker-dealer price confirmations as a means to validate the values it had assigned to the Funds’ fair valued securities. The Funds’ Independent Auditor used similar requests for third party broker-dealer price confirmations as part of its annual year-end audits of the Funds. Fund Accounting or the Independent Auditor would periodically send such requests to broker-dealers asking them to provide price confirmations for various portfolio securities.

During the period from January through July 2007, when month-end dealer price confirmations were received by Fund Accounting, an employee of Fund Accounting performed a review to estimate whether they contained any securities prices that varied from current portfolio values by more than five percent. If so, then Kelsoe determined whether the current values should be maintained or a new value-which may or may not have been the price given by the broker-dealer-should be assigned to the security. Thus, Fund Accounting generally allowed Kelsoe to determine whether broker-dealer price confirmations were used or ignored. In some instances, when price confirmations were received that were substantially lower than current portfolio values, Fund Accounting personnel, acting at the direction of Kelsoe, lowered values of bonds over a period of days, in a series of pre-planned reductions to values at or closer to, but still above, the price confirmations. As a result, during the interim days, Fund Accounting did not price those bonds at their current fair value.

During the period from January through July 2007, Fund Accounting failed to record which bond values were not adjusted in response to dealer price confirmations at Kelsoe’s direction.

The head of Fund Accounting reported to Weller, and Weller was a member of the Valuation Committee. He knew, or was reckless in not knowing, of the deficiencies in the implementation of the valuation procedures set forth above, and failed to remedy them or otherwise make sure fair-valued securities were accurately priced and the Funds’ NAVs were accurately calculated. During the period from January through July 2007, Weller was aware that: (i) the Valuation Committee did not adequately supervise Fund Accounting’s application of the valuation factors; (ii) Kelsoe was supplying fair value price adjustments for specific securities to Fund Accounting but the members of the Valuation Committee did not generally know which securities Kelsoe supplied fair values for or what those fair values were, and did not generally receive supporting documentation for those values; and (iii) the only other pricing test regularly applied by the Valuation Committee was a “look back” test, which compared the sales price of any security sold by a Fund to the valuation of that security used in the NAV calculation for the five business days preceding the sale. The test only covered securities after they were sold; thus, at any given time, the Valuation Committee never knew how many securities’ prices could ultimately be validated by it. Weller nevertheless signed the Funds’ annual and semi-annual financial reports on Forms N-CSR, filed with the Commission, including certifications pursuant to Sections 302 and 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

During the period from January 2007 through July 2007, Morgan Keegan, acting through Weller and Fund Accounting, failed to employ reasonable procedures to price the Funds’ portfolio securities and, as a result of that failure, did not calculate current NAVs for the Funds. Despite these failures, Morgan Keegan published daily NAVs of the Funds which it could not know were accurate and, as distributor of the open-end portfolios, sold and redeemed shares to investors based on those NAVs.

On various dates from January 2007 through July 2007, Morgan Asset, through Kelsoe, screened and influenced the price confirmations obtained from at least one broker-dealer (“the Submitting Firm”). Among other things, the Submitting Firm was induced to provide interim price confirmations that were lower than the values at which the Funds were valuing certain bonds, but higher than the initial confirmations that the Submitting Firm had intended to provide. The interim price confirmations enabled the Funds to avoid marking down the value of securities to reflect current fair value. Kelsoe was aware that use of the interim price confirmations was inconsistent with the valuation procedures and did not reflect fair value, that the Submitting Firm would be providing lower price confirmations in response to future pricing validation requests, and that the Funds would be required to further mark down the value of the securities to reflect their already diminished value, but that information was not disclosed to Fund Accounting, the Funds’ Boards of Directors or the Independent Auditor. In some instances, even after causing the Submitting Firm to increase its price confirmations, Kelsoe subsequently provided price adjustments to Fund Accounting that were higher than even the Submitting Firm’s increased price confirmations. These adjustments were not consistent with the Funds’ procedures. In other instances, the Submitting Firm was induced to not provide price confirmations to Fund Accounting (or, depending on the period, to the Independent Auditor), where those price confirmations would have been significantly lower than the Funds’ current valuations of the relevant bonds. Fund Accounting and the Funds’ Boards were not advised that the Submitting Firm had proposed price confirmations which were lower than the current valuations recorded by the Funds, and that the Submitting Firm had refrained from submitting price confirmations to Fund Accounting or had submitted price confirmations at higher prices than it had originally planned.

In each of the Funds’ annual and semi-annual reports filed with the Commission on Forms N-CSR during the relevant period (including, among others, the Annual Report for the Morgan Keegan Select Fund, Inc. for the year-ended June 30, 2007 filed with the Commission on October 4, 2007), Kelsoe included a signed letter to investors reporting on the Funds’ performance “based on net asset value.” In fact, the performance reported was materially misstated. Untrue statements of material fact concerning the Funds’ performance were made in the Funds’ annual and semi-annual reports filed with the Commission on Forms N-CSR. Morgan Asset, through Kelsoe, also provided a quarterly valuation packet reflecting inflated prices for certain securities to the Funds’ Boards, failed to disclose to the Funds’ Boards information indicating that the Funds’ NAVs were inflated and that broker-dealer price confirmations were being screened and caused to be altered, and provided Fund Accounting with unsubstantiated price adjustments. In addition, the prospectuses incorrectly described Morgan Asset as responsible for fair valuation of the Funds’ portfolios.

 

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