Merrill Fined $42 Million for Hiding Where It Sent Client Orders

Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit agreed to pay a $42 million penalty to settle a U.S. regulator’s allegations that it routed millions of customer orders to outside brokers, while telling them it had executed the transactions internally. From 2008 to 2013, Merrill hid that the fact that client requests to buy and sell stock were being handled by proprietary trading firms and other outside entities, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a Tuesday order. Merrill did so after some customers specifically asked that their orders not be executed externally because they were concerned about “information leakage,” the SEC said.