The SEC announced last week that it has completed the first in a series of disbursements from a Fair Fund that will return approximately $321 million to more than two million investors in its settlement with respect to market timing in the Alliance mutual funds complex.
The settlement resulted from an SEC enforcement action charging Alliance Capital Management with allowing market timing trading between January 2001 and September 2003 in Alliance mutual funds, contrary to those funds’ public disclosures. The SEC stated that more than $46 million in Fair Funds have been distributed to approximately 300,000 investors in this first disbursement.
Dick D’Anna, Director of the SEC’s Office of Collections and Distributions stated that the SEC has now returned more than $4 billion to investors under the Fair Funds provision of Sarbanes-Oxley.