Cayman Islands-based Caledonian Bank Ltd. filed for bankruptcy in New York, saying that a federal court’s freeze on its U.S. assets triggered a run on the bank by customers, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued the bank Feb. 6 over claims that it profited from stock sales of invalidly registered shell companies. The SEC won a court order the same day temporarily freezing the bank’s accounts at Northern Trust International Banking Corp. and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. A subsequent waiver of the freeze didn’t calm customers who made “a substantially larger number of withdrawal requests than expected,” Caledonian said in court papers filed yesterday in bankruptcy court.
