JPMorgan Chase & Co. won a judge’s approval to pay $150 million to settle investor claims that it hid as much as $6.2 million in losses caused by a trade dubbed the London Whale, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. U.S. District Judge George Daniels in New York yesterday accepted the accord, which ended a suit brought by a group of pension funds in 2012. They accused JPMorgan of turning its London-based Chief Investment Office in London into a “secret hedge fund” that caused the losses. The accord in the class-action suit “is adequate and reasonable,” the judge said. The bank told investors that the office’s primary role was managing risk, but the lawsuit alleged it was instead engaging in risky trades to generate profits. Ohio pension funds and other plaintiffs claimed they incurred tens of millions of dollars of losses because their fund managers were given false and misleading information. Bruno Iksil, who became known as the London Whale because he amassed large, market-moving positions in credit derivatives, made the trades for the bank.
