Green Street to Settle Claims With NASD

Green Street Advisors, the Newport Beach-based commercial real estate consulting firm, agreed to pay $150,000 to settle NASD claims it had issued research reports prepared by eight unregistered analysts.

Green Street, which didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing, issued more than 120 reports written last year by the analysts who hadn’t taken required exams or registered with NASD, the regulator said Wednesday.

“It is particularly disturbing that this firm was aware of the problem, failed to observe the new rules’ deadlines, and yet continued to issue reports without properly registering their analysts,” said Barry Goldsmith, head of NASD enforcement.

Warner Griswold, Green Street’s chief operations officer, said the problem was an administrative one. “We completed the exams many months before the rest of the world but filed late for an extension,” he said.

New NASD exam and registration rules took effect March 30, 2004, after a series of enforcement actions relating to conflicts of interests involving research analysts. NASD, formerly known as the National Assn. of Securities Dealers, fined SunTrust Capital Markets Inc. $100,000 in May in its first enforcement action on the analyst rules.