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ReutersNEW YORK, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) will pay $12.5 million to resolve charges it failed in arbitration cases to provide e-mails that it said were destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when in fact it had saved the e-mails on backup files.
The securities firm will pay $9.5 million into a fund for several thousand arbitration claimants, and was fined $3 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the brokerage industry regulator said on Thursday.
The settlement also resolves charges that Morgan Stanley failed to provide its supervisory manual for branch managers to arbitration claimants. Morgan Stanley will hire an independent consultant to ensure it provides materials to retail brokerage clients in arbitrations. The company did not admit wrongdoing.
Morgan Stanley has faced many legal and regulatory problems for withholding e-mails, in part a result of the destruction of its New York City e-mail servers in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Millions of e-mails presumed lost had actually been backed up on other servers or on users' individual computers. Last December, the National Association of Securities Dealers, a FINRA predecessor, had accused Morgan Stanley in a disciplinary complaint of falsely claiming it could not produce the e-mails.
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