Scandal news from 2004:

The investigators 3/16/04 The watchdogs Mass. Secretary of State William F. Galvin, and N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. SEC names Boston chief The SEC named a veteran accounting industry lawyer to be the new chief of its Boston office, a post that has been at the center of the trading scandal engulfing the mutual fund industry.  10/05/03: Mass. watchdogs zero in  NECN: Galvin Urges Reform Spitzer becoming hot property New York AG Eliot Spitzer is traveling a path that could lead straight to the governorship in 2006.

Questions and answers Columns and opinions  YOUR MONEY: Survive the scandal  YOUR FUNDS: How it may affect you  YOUR FUNDS: Watch for bad advice  Search more in the archives Market timing  Definition: Market timing  Definition: Late trading What to do with your money Many individual investors are still trying to understand the allegations against Putnam Investments, and figure out what to do with their money.  Q&A : Economist Eric Zitzewitz  How mutual funds combat market timing Money Mailbag

Hub firms under fire FleetBoston Financial 3/16/04 Putnam Investments 3/16/04  More on Putnam Investments Mass. Financial Services 3/31/2004 Prudential Securities complaints  PDF: Secretary of State  PDF: Exhibits of Pru complaint  PDF: Official SEC complaint  Download Adobe Acrobat

Past scandals

1928-29: United Founders Corp., a highly leveraged investment trust — trusts were an early version of the mutual fund — becomes country’s biggest investment pool, raising $686 million. Its value plunged to 50 cents a share in the 1929 crash.

1928-29: Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., another leveraged investment trust, launched Shenandoah Corp. and Blue Ridge Corp., trusts engaged in dubious practices. Goldman Sachs Trading initially sold for $104 per share but collapsed to $1.75 a share in 1929.

1953-1959: Hovey and Hilton Slayton of St. Louis fraudulently collected advisory fees for a stock mutual fund and engaged in improper sales practices.

1970: Bernie Cornfeld raised $2.5 billion for a sham mutual fund, Investors Overseas Services, he ran in Switzerland. IOS imploded in 1970. Robert Vesco is later accused of looting IOS; he . ed to the Caribbean and became a fugitive.

1973: Nine-year scam by Equity Funding Corp. of America, a mutual funds seller, virtually collapsed amid revelations of fabricated earnings.

1990: Mutual funds, big buyers of junk bonds sold by Michael Milken and others, suffered big losses when the junk bond market collapsed.

1992: Fidelity fund manager Patricia Ostrander found guilty of personally accepting lucrative securities in return for buying junk bonds from Milken for funds she managed.

1993: Kemper Corp. repaid $9.5 million to investors in two mutual funds after SEC charged the funds’ manager with allocating bad investments to the funds and good investments to Kemper’s pension fund.

1995: Fund managers John Kaweske of Invesco Funds Group and Roger Honour, formerly of Alliance Capital, paid total SEC . nes of $545,000 to settle charges of not properly disclosing personal investments.

1999: Scudder-Kemper Investments . ned $250,000 by SEC for failure to oversee derivatives trading by managers, who lost $16 million of mutual fund investors’ money.

2000: Dreyfus Corp. paid SEC $3 million to settle allegations of failing to disclose heavy IPO investments by one of its stock funds.

SOURCES: Bloomberg News; Investment Company Institute; Fidelity’s World by Diana B. Henriques, The Great Crash by John K. Galbraith and The Boston Globe.