Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust and TD Bank, Gibraltar face trial

two banks where Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein laundered money will face a trial over multimillion-dollar claims by victims of the scam, a Broward County judge has ruled.
Circuit Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld declined to entirely dismiss any of the suit’s defendants.
In an order, dated Dec. 9 and distributed by plaintiffs’ attorneys on Tuesday, Streitfeld ruled that all claims against the two bank defendants, TD Bank and Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust, would go forward.
A hearing was set Tuesday discuss a trial schedule. TD Bank said because it was pending litigation it would not comment other than to say "it believes and expects the facts to prove that it is not liable for the acts of Scott Rothstein."
The suit was filed last year by investors who lost money in the Ponzi scheme. It has grown to include about $160 million in claims related to the $1.2 billion scheme.
Streitfeld also ruled against motions to dismiss any claims against several individual defendants, including Frank Spinosa, former regional VP of TD Bank; Jennifer Kerstetter and Roseanne Caretsky, employees of TD Bank; David Boden, attorney and former general counsel for Rothstein’s now-defunct law firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler; and Andrew Barnett, who worked as RRA’s corporate development director.
There were some defendants who succeeded in getting some counts against them dismissed:

• Frank Preve of Fort Lauderdale, who worked for the Banyon feeder funds in the scheme. Streitfeld dismissed only some counts against Preve concerning breach of fiduciary duty.
• Philadelphia-based hedge fund Ballamor Capital and its principal Barry Bekkedam. The judge ruled that only certain plaintiff investors could pursue claims against Ballamor and Bekkedam.
• R.L. Pearson of Fort Lauderdale and his company, R.L. Pearson & Associates, which allegedly handled investments in the scheme. The judge threw out all claims except those from two investors, Viceroy Global Investments and Concorde Capital.
• New York-based Platinum Partners Value Arbitrage Fund LP and Centurion Structured Growth LLC. The two funds will face claims of aiding and abetting fraud, and civil conspiracy to defraud, but other claims were dismissed.

Another defendant in the suit, accounting firm Berenfeld Spritzer Shechter & Sheer, is working on a resolution of the claims through a $10 million settlement agreement in RRA’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

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Spanish Lenders May Need $120 Billion, Moody’s Says - Bloomberg

Spanish Lenders May Need $120 Billion, Moody’s Says - Bloomberg: "Spanish banks that helped spur the country’s property boom with mortgages and loans to developers may need as much as 90 billion euros ($120 billion) in capital, Moody’s Investors Service said.
That estimate is based on a scenario in which lenders would need a Tier 1 capital ratio, a measure of their financial strength, of as much as 12 percent to tap funding, Moody’s said in a statement. Spanish banks declined today, led by Banco Santander SA, the country’s biggest.
“Given the situation after Ireland where the banks will have to be recapitalized to a much higher capital level, to a core Tier 1 ratio of 12 percent, we ran stress tests to see what that would mean in the context of Spain, if Spanish banks had to be recapitalized to a higher level in order to retain market confidence,” Kathrin Muehlbronner, an analyst at Moody’s, said in a phone interview."

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