Maris Is Punished as a Wall Street Whistle-Blower - NYTimes.com

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June 1, 2011, 3:26 pm â  Legal/Regulatory | The Trade

For a Whistle-Blower, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

By JESSE EISINGER, ProPublica

It has been noted repeatedly that almost no top bankers have faced serious

consequences for their actions in the financial crisis. But there is a Wall

Street corollary that might be even more pernicious: good guys are punished.



Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Maris

Whistle-blowers, truth-tellers and fraud-spotters pay a miserable price on Wall

Street. They are vilified. They are fired. Sometimes they are even sued. Instead

of being sought after, they become persona non grata.

Recently, I caught up with Maris, a one-time star pharmaceutical analyst

for Bank of America who became embroiled in one of the most notorious bull/bear

battles of the last decade. His story encapsulates just how broken Wall Street

culture is.

In 2003, Mr. Maris put out a sell report on Biovail, a Canadian drug company. He

fixed on the company’s bizarre explanation of why it had missed its earnings

estimates: a truck carrying a supposedly huge amount of medicine crashed at the

very end of the quarter. Mr. Maris detailed why this was wildly implausible.

Desperate to deflect the attention, Biovail took the offensive. It sued Mr.

Maris and Bank of America in early 2006. It also sued SAC Capital Advisors, the

hedge fund, and Gradient Analytics, an independent research firm, claiming a

giant conspiracy to drive down its stock price with false reports.

For a time, Bank of America stood by Mr. Maris. But it eventually caved and

fired him — two weeks before the end of 2006, enabling it to not pay his

bonus. Mr. Maris is now in arbitration, seeking $21 million in back pay.

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