Seattle Times – A top Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) official confirmed that the agency is investigating Amaranth Advisors, which lost billions of dollars this month due to bad bets onnatural-gas prices, and the probe is focused on whether the fund misled investors.
“From an enforcement perspective, it’s really whether investors received misleading information,” SEC Commissioner Annette Nazareth said Monday.
Nazareth said the SEC is not focused on the roles of big U.S. banks that did business with Amaranth in the months leading up to its disclosure last week of about $6 billion in losses.
The banks and broker-dealers don’t seem to have been exposed to those losses and “have done a good job managing their risk,” Nazareth said.
One of those banks, JPMorgan Chase, served as Amaranth’s clearing firm and last week stepped in, along with hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, to acquire Amaranth’s energy portfolio.
