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The Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA) is pressing for the creation of an online clearinghouse of documents uncovered during the New York State Attorney General's recent investigation into alleged conflicts of interest involving financial analysts at some of Wall Street's largest brokerage houses. The alleged conflicts centered around the analysts' public pronouncements regarding stocks for which their companies also provided financial services.

 

PIABA is asking many of the entities involved in the case to create a web-based clearinghouse containing "the thousands of emails and other documents that led to the historic settlement." The organization hopes to give individual investors access to "the documents that helped persuade regulators that wrongdoing had occurred." In his letter to the Securities & Exchange Commission, PIABA President, J. Pat Sadler said, "History has shown that the offending firms will do everything in their power to prevent this disclosure. As such, we believe the time has come for an entity to step up to the plate and provide an accessible, centralized pool of evidence in this and future cases so that defrauded investors have a fair opportunity to prove their cases."

 

Sadler, an Atlanta investor arbitration attorney, added in his letter, "This is not a difficult task in this technological age. A number of years ago, the state attorneys general created a model Web-based clearinghouse that made public all the relevant documents in the tobacco settlements in an easily retrievable format."

 

The organization has sent letters to the SEC, the National Association of Securities Dealers, the New York Stock Exchange, and the North American Securities Administrators Association.