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Lower court threw out jury award to whistleblower

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Whistleblower says he held back misleading reports

By Daniel Wiessner

Nov 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court declined on

Monday to hear a bid by a former UBS bond strategist to

revive a $2.6 million jury award in his lawsuit accusing the

Swiss bank of unlawfully firing him for refusing to publish

misleading research reports.

The justices turned away whistleblower Trevor Murray's appeal of

a lower court's ruling that the Manhattan jury that decided in

favor of him in 2020 had received flawed instructions from the

trial judge about the legal standard for proving unlawful

retaliation under U.S. law.

The Supreme Court had already issued one ruling in the case. The

justices in 2024 reinstated the jury award after it was

previously overturned by a lower court, deciding that financial

whistleblowers only have to prove unequal treatment, and not

that their employers had a retaliatory motive, to prevail in

retaliation lawsuits.

Since that ruling, the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court

of Appeals in February again threw out the award, finding that

flawed jury instructions in the trial made it too easy to

conclude that Murray's whistleblowing contributed to the UBS

decision to fire him.

The 2nd Circuit initially overturned the verdict in 2022,

finding that a 2002 federal law called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act

required Murray to prove that UBS had acted with retaliatory

intent. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed that decision

last year.

The Sarbanes-Oxley law created enhanced accounting standards

for publicly traded U.S. companies after a series of accounting

scandals, along with new legal protections for employees who

report illegal conduct.

Now, Murray is asking the Supreme Court to rule that businesses

like UBS act unlawfully when they let whistleblowing affect

employment-related decisions in any way. UBS in an October brief

had urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal and, if it

did, to adopt a higher bar for proving retaliation claims.

Murray, who worked in UBS's mortgage securitization unit,

accused bank officials of pressuring him to issue skewed and

bullish research on commercial mortgage-backed securities in

order to support its trading and underwriting operations. Murray

has said he was fired in 2012 about two months after complaining

to supervisors and despite receiving excellent performance

reviews.

UBS has said Murray was fired as part of a cost-cutting

campaign that eliminated thousands of jobs, not because of his

complaints.

The jury in federal court in Manhattan sided with Murray in

2020. U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla, who presided

over the trial, rejected a bid by UBS to set aside the verdict.