New York – Two whistleblowers are set to share a record $61 million award from the Securities and Exchange Commission for helping make the case that JPMorgan Chase & Co. failed to disclose to wealthy clients that it was steering them into investments that would be most profitable for the bank.
The SEC issued letters on Wednesday notifying six whistleblower applicants of the preliminary decision. The letters said that two of them would share almost a quarter of the record asset-management settlement that the SEC reached with the bank in December 2015.
JPMorgan agreed to pay $307 million, with $267 million going to the SEC and $40 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The SEC wrote Wednesday that one person would receive 18 percent of the SEC portion of the settlement and the other 5 percent, which would translate to $48 million and $13 million.
The higher figure would dwarf the previous top SEC award, for $30 million, paid to an anonymous whistleblower in 2014, according the figures posted on the agency’s website. The contents of the letters to the six award applicants, which were reported earlier by SourceMedia, were confirmed by people familiar with them. The SEC doesn’t identify whistleblowers.
The SEC and JPMorgan declined to comment.
