U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: "The terrorists ate my homework" defense fails for Morgan Stanley

The securities cop known as the NASD (its release) "announced today that it has charged Morgan Stanley DW, Inc. with routinely failing to provide emails to claimants in arbitration proceedings as well as to regulators -- and with falsely claiming that millions of emails it possessed had been lost in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, where its email servers were housed." Morgan Stanley, also implicated in the Enron energy debacle in my previous post, has been a frequent target of NASD and the SEC. More from the Washington Post:

It is not the company's first run-in with regulators. Earlier this year Morgan Stanley & Co., a separate unit for institutional clients, agreed to pay $15 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it failed to produce documents related to a pair of enforcement probes. In March 2005, a judge in Florida criticized the same unit for withholding evidence in a case filed by financier Ronald O. Perelman.
Two years ago, Morgan Stanley's brokerage arm paid $250,000 to resolve separate NASD charges that it failed to comply with obligations to turn over papers in arbitration cases.

The complaint by NASD may give securities fraud victims a rare opportunity to re-open adverse arbitration decisions.