A J.P. Morgan Chase whistleblower will receive about $30 million for providing crucial information to a successful Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation into the biggest U.S. bank.
The award was the largest in the history of the program, the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) said Thursday in a statement. It disclosed little else about the case, saying that it is prohibited from revealing information that could identify whistle-blowers.
The payment was linked to a $367 million settlement from 2015 that J.P. Morgan agreed to pay for allegations it didn’t disclose that it was pushing wealth management clients into potentially unsuitable investments, according to Bloomberg, which cited attorney Edward Siedle. That included $100 million that went to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — $40 million in penalties and $60 million in disgorgement. The New York-based bank has said it has since improved disclosures. Darin Oduyoye, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan, declined to comment.
The bank agreed to pay an additional $267 million at the time to the Securities and Exchange Commission, where a pair of preliminary whistle-blower awards totaling $61 million were authorized a year ago but still await final approval.
The previous record for a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) whistle-blower was an award of more than $10 million in March 2016, the agency said. Whistleblowers get between 10 and 30 percent of the sanctions that result from their information.
“We hope that this award will continue to facilitate the upward momentum and success of the CFTC’s Whistleblower Program by attracting those with knowledge of wrongdoing to come forward,” Christopher Ehrman, Director of the CFTC’s Whistleblower Office, said in the statement.
