Paul J. DUBACH, Appellant, v. George H. WEITZEL; Thomas A. Welter; And Iowa Wisconsin Capital, Inc., Appellees

135 F.3d 590, 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 1783, 1998 WL 37771
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
DecidedFebruary 3, 1998
Docket97-1403NI
StatusPublished
Cited by11 cases

This text of 135 F.3d 590 (Paul J. DUBACH, Appellant, v. George H. WEITZEL; Thomas A. Welter; And Iowa Wisconsin Capital, Inc., Appellees) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Paul J. DUBACH, Appellant, v. George H. WEITZEL; Thomas A. Welter; And Iowa Wisconsin Capital, Inc., Appellees, 135 F.3d 590, 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 1783, 1998 WL 37771 (8th Cir. 1998).

Opinion

RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Chief Judge.

Paul Dubach brought this suit against George Weitzel and Thomas Welter for converting to their own use a certificate of deposit (“CD”) belonging to the parties’ jointly owned corporation. The District Court 1 dismissed Dubach’s action: the federal securities law claims because the CD was not a security, and the shareholder derivative claims because no jurisdictional basis remained. We affirm.

I.

Dubach, Weitzel, and Welter were shareholders in a corporation called Iowa Wisconsin Capital (“IWC”). IWC’s assets included a $100,000 CD purchased from Dupaco Credit Union. In 1994, as a result of separate litigation between the parties, Dubach discovered that Weitzel and Welter had pledged the CD as collateral for personal loans, in the amounts of $50,000 to each of them.

Dubach brought suit in federal court, alleging that Weitzel’s and Welter’s conversion and encumbrance of the CD constituted violations of the Securities Act of 1933, 15 U.S.C. §§ 77a — 77aa (1994), the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. §§ 78a— 78hh-l (1994), and the Investment Company Act of 1940, 15 U.S.C. §§ 80a-l — 80a-52 *592 (1994). 2 He also brought shareholder derivative claims on behalf of IWC, alleging wrongful conversion and negligent and fraudulent misrepresentation. Though the complaint alleged both federal question and diversity jurisdiction, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1332 (1994), it failed properly to state the grounds for diversity jurisdiction, using the word “resident” instead of “citizen.” The shareholder derivative claims were characterized as pendent.

The appellees moved to dismiss Dubach’s complaint, arguing that federal securities laws did not apply to the CD and that the shareholder derivative claims had no independent basis for federal jurisdiction. In response, Dubach reasserted his federal securities law claims. The District Court dismissed the complaint.

II.

The District Court correctly determined that the CD was not a security for the purposes of the federal securities laws. The Supreme Court’s decision in Marine Bank v. Weaver, 455 U.S. 551, 102 S.Ct. 1220, 71 L.Ed.2d 409 (1982), is instructive. In that case, a CD was pledged by its holders to guarantee a bank’s loan to another party, for use as working capital. When the loan instead was applied towards past obligations that the third party owed the bank, the holders of the CD sued the bank under the antifraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act, claiming that the CD was a security under that law. The Court’s holding turned on its assessment of the investor’s risk of loss:

This certifícate of deposit was issued by a federally regulated bank which is subject to the comprehensive set of regulations governing the banking industry. Deposits in federally regulated banks are protected by the reserve, reporting, and inspection requirements of the federal banking laws; advertising relating to the interest paid on deposits is also regulated. In addition, deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation_ It is unnecessary to subject issuers of bank certificates of deposit to liability under the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws since the holders of bank certificates of deposit are abundantly protected under the federal banking laws. We therefore hold that [this] certificate of deposit ... is not a security.

Id. at 558-59, 102 S.Ct. at 1224 (footnotes and citations omitted).

The Court then went on to examine whether the agreement pledging the CD in exchange for consideration could be considered a security, though the CD itself was not. The Court held that the instrument did not fall within the definition of a security because it involved only private and unique interests, in contrast to “[t]he unusual instruments found to constitute securities in prior cases[, which] involved offers to a number of potential investors, not a private transaction.” Id. at 559-60, 102 S.Ct. at 1225. The Court did not entirely foreclose the possibility that some CDs, under particular circumstances, would fall within the governance of federal securities laws. Rather, “each transaction must be analyzed and evaluated on the basis of the content of the instruments’ in question, the purposes intended to be served, and the factual setting as a whole.” Id. at 560 n. 11, 102 S.Ct. at 1225 n. 11.

Credit unions are regulated by law, see 12 U.S.C. §§ 1751-1795k (1994); Iowa Code §§ 533.1—533.67 (1997), and the reasoning in Marine Bank disposes of Dubach’s argument that the CD was a security. The CD’s issuance was a conventional commercial transaction. To apply federal securities law would “double-coat” the transaction. Compare Gary Plastic Packaging Corp. v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 756 F.2d 230 (2d Cir.1985) (where customers relied on skill and financial stability of brokerage firm and were not protected from risk of brokerage’s failure or fraud, application of federal securities law was not “double coating”).

Further, the pledge of the CD did not alter its nature. Dubach urges that even if the CD as issued were not a security, Weitzel and Welter “transformed the [$100,000] CD *593 into a security by means of the various transactions which they formulated with the Du-paco Credit Union in order to allow each of them individually to receive the interest on the CD.” Compl. at 5. The Supreme Court, in Marine Bank, rejected a similar argument: “We reject [the proposition] ... that the certificate of deposit was somehow transformed into a security when it was pledged, even though it was not a security when purchased.” Marine Bank, 455 U.S. at 559 n. 9, 102 S.Ct. at 1225 n. 9.

Finally, neither the pledge of the CD nor the resulting issuance of promissory notes was a transaction requiring the investor protections of federal securities laws. Courts have extended these laws to cover investing schemes that, though constructed of banking transactions, elude the consumer protections of banking law. For instance, where a broker engaged in excessive buying and selling of CDs in order to maximize his commissions, this Court held that the CDs should be treated as securities to the extent that banking laws did not insure the investor’s resultant losses. Olson v. E.F. Hutton & Co., 957 F.2d 622 (8th Cir.1992). See also

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135 F.3d 590, 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 1783, 1998 WL 37771, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/paul-j-dubach-appellant-v-george-h-weitzel-thomas-a-welter-and-iowa-ca8-1998.