Christ Church Cathedral, Indianapolis, has filed a federal lawsuit that claims “JPMorgan caused the church trusts to lose approximately $13 million in value.”
From Tim Evans of The Indianapolis Star’s article:
From 2004 through the end of 2013, investment divisions of JPMorgan served as the independent trustee over the two church accounts valued at more than $30 million. The lawsuit says JPMorgan’s actions during much of that period were directed at earning a profit for the bank rather than doing what was in the best interest of the church.
The church’s losses resulted from JPMorgan’s decisions “to purchase over 177 different investment products, mostly from itself, … because they produced the highest revenues to JPMorgan, to the detriment of Christ Church,” the lawsuit says.
Many of those JPMorgan products were “structured in a manner that would ensure that JPMorgan and its subsidiaries would receive substantial fees, oftentimes receiving more in fees than its clients, including Christ Church, received in returns from the investment,” the lawsuit says.
More, from Fortune:
The suit comes less than a week after multiple news outlets reported a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into whether J.P. Morgan has been steering its private-banking clients toward its own investment products and away from those offered by other banks. The SEC inquiry is reportedly running in parallel to a similar investigation by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
