J.P. Morgan Securities has made good on its pledge to challenge a $4.25 million award it was ordered to pay to a former advisor who alleged that he had been wrongfully terminated for billing the company for a $642.50 platter of sandwiches for a 2024 Super Bowl get-together at his home.
The advisor, Brent Bodner, had argued that his termination was pretextual—that J.P. Morgan had dismissed him over a technical error on the expense report and then proceeded to poach his clients.
The expense report, filed by Bodner’s assistant, noted the location of the event as the deli where they ordered the sandwiches, not Bodner’s Beverly Hills residence, where the event took place. J.P. Morgan said that amounted to a violation of its hospitality policy.
Bodner, who is now with Wells Fargo, took his case to an arbitration panel convened by Finra, the brokerage industry’s self-regulatory authority, which granted Bodner $4.25 million in compensatory damages, plus interest, and called for his registration records to delete the explanation of his termination and update the reason for his departure from J.P. Morgan to read “voluntary.” (He had asked for $15 million in compensatory damages and another $15 million in punitive damages.)
Facing a 30-day deadline to pay the award or ask a court to vacate the award, J.P. Morgan filed its petition with a federal court in California’s Central District on Thursday, arguing that the Finra panel granted Bodner relief that “could never have been obtained in a court of law,” and that the damages award was “untethered to any evidence or testimony.” It also said the order to update the reason for Bodner’s termination to voluntary clearly violates Finra’s requirement that the U-5 forms detailing the circumstances under which brokers leave their firms be accurate.
The firm further contended that Bodner was an at-will employee of JPMorgan Chase Bank, which isn’t a Finra member, unlike its associated broker-dealer, J.P. Morgan Securities, the named respondent in Bodner’s claim.
In its petition to vacate the arbitration award, J.P. Morgan Securities says that the decision to fire Bodner, as a legal matter, was “unimpeachable.”
“Bodner was an at-will employee and Chase was entitled to tire him for any reason, or for no reason at all,” the firm says in its petition. “Chase had ample reason to terminate Bodner’s employment: By misrepresenting the nature of an expense to access corporate funds, Bodner had abused a position of trust, and he had violated clear corporate policies.”
J.P. Morgan alleges that Bodner’s expense form indicated that he was holding a client event at a restaurant, but instead billed the company for a Super Bowl party at his home. His lawyer says that only four people attended the event at Bodner’s home—Bodner and his business partner, a client, and a prospective client.
The lawyer, Marc Rosen, says he looks forward to representing Bodner in court, which “will afford us an opportunity to fully expose JPM Securities’ outrageous treatment of an outstanding financial advisor.”
“Pretextual terminations that tarnish careers of honest employees is never permissible,” he says. “The arbitrators saw and heard all of the evidence, and JPM’s desperate appeal will further validate the outcome.”