One would think anyone going to the trouble to file a lawsuit would be eager to claim the fruits of victory, but apparently that’s not the case in the analyst-research scandal of a few years back. Investors had charged analysts at Wall Street firms with having conflicts of interest by writing positive research reports so that their firms could win business, though investments based on those reports could have resulted in losses to investors. The matter has been settled with banks agreeing to put up a lot of money to repay investors, but to date, a large number of them are missing in action. According to Reuters, there have been fewer than 20,000 claims out of a total of around 33,000, and as a result there is about $164 million in unclaimed funds. Wrote U.S. District Judge William Pauley in an order, “In view of the prodigious efforts of the distribution fund administrator, the magnitude of the unexpended sums in many of the settlement funds, and the loss parameters of the consent judgments, it appears impossible to distribute all of those monies to identifiable victims.”
