Newsletter
Issue 2
3 Advisors Sue Ameriprise, Cite Racial Bias
BY TODD MASON
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
FEBRUARY 17, 2006
Three financial advisers have sued Ameriprise Financial Inc. in federal court in Philadelphia alleging racial discrimination.
Vaughn Coleman, Aida Gonzalez and Ryan Starks allege that the firm subjected them as independent contractors to a level of scrutiny not imposed on white colleagues.
They say in an amended complaint that Ameriprise retaliated against them after they filed suit in December by asking their clients in a letter for meetings to review whether transactions "have occurred with your knowledge and authorization."
Coleman, 33, Gonzalez, 29, and Starks, 30, have no customer complaints filed against them at the NASD, a securities-industry self-regulatory agency.
Gonzalez and Starks have since left Ameriprise. They say the firm had five black advisers among 256 in its Philadelphia region before they left.
"We don’t agree that their allegations have merit," said Susan Gethin, a spokeswoman for Ameriprise, of Minneapolis. The insurance and investment firm was spun off from American Express Inc. in October.
Ameriprise’s attorneys here, from the Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel L.L.P., asked the court to dismiss claims of defamation, retaliation and fraud.
Coleman alleged in the lawsuit that Ameriprise induced him to buy a practice from a black financial adviser who was leaving the firm and then refused to turn over clients’ files.
The three say Ameriprise compliance officials seized their files last year. "They removed files from my office like I was a criminal," Gonzalez said in an interview.
Ameriprise did not follow its own procedures in its scrutiny of the advisers, said Aaron Freiwald, the trio’s attorney.
Coleman and Gonzalez kept offices in a building in West Philadelphia catering to black professionals. In the lawsuit, they said that Ameriprise urged them to move, questioning whether the building "was an appropriate fit for the company’s corporate image.