INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

While the stock market decided that higher consumer prices weren’t such a bad thing after all, as long as Alan Greenspan and the Federal Open Market Committee didn’t actually do anything about them, along came the Securities and Exchange Commission to rain on brokers’ pre-Memorial Day parade.

Take Datek Online. Please. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined the Iselin, N.J., virtual broker 50 grand for sloppy bookkeeping, dipping into customer accounts to pay its own bills during cash flow problems, and filing a false document as a coverup. Former chief financial officer Moishe Zelcer was fined $10,000 and suspended for 90 days. No customer money was lost, but it was put to a greater risk, the SEC says.

Back in the real world, defunct New York City brokerage Oakford Corp., its owners and four floor brokers pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to front-running, or placing personal trades ahead of customers’. It’s the first time the SEC has prosecuted brokers for making personal trades on the floor of an exchange.

These are all small potatoes on the steam table of life, though, compared to Moby-Dick and friends swept up by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s fish net: Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and Japan’s Sumitomo.

Merrill denied all allegations that it had conspired with Global Minerals and Metals Inc. (which had no comment) to boost the price of copper in 1995. The beneficiary? The sumo champ of Tokyo brokers, which wasn’t charged, of course.

No big deal? Well, says Geoffrey Aranow, the commission’s director of enforcement, it’s “one of the most serious worldwide manipulations of commodity markets” in the agency’s 25 years.

Another wirehouse with Humpty Dumpty on its face is Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. It had fired analyst Christian Curry, 24, after a gay men’s magazine published explicit photos of him. The firing had nothing to do with the pictures, the company said at the time, but he filed a complaint anyway.

Months later, Morgan Stanley had Mr. Curry, who is black, arrested on charges of plotting to plant racist e-mail in its computer system. This week the Manhattan district attorney dropped all the charges because, officials say, the company paid a fink $10,000 to set Mr. Curry up. Morgan Stanley, now the object of an investigation, had no comment; the purported fink denied receiving any money.

Mr. Curry, now a model in California, is suing for enough to make even Bill Gates notice: $1.35 billion. The grounds are libel, conspiracy and human rights violations.

Breakfast, anyone?

The good times are getting better. Tiffany & Co., the tony (not you, Ant’ny) Fifth Avenue jeweler in New York, declared a two-for-one split in its $82 stock and raised the dividend 33%, to 12 cents a share, on a pre-split basis. The payout comes July 21 to shareholders as of June 23.

For the first quarter, profits were 44 cents a share vs. 31 cents a year earlier, a $5 million increase. And no wonder, if customers are anything like a young female acquaintance. At age 3, she started hunting through the mail for the sky-blue catalog with the “jewelry stuff.” Get ’em early and they’re yours for life.

Innocents abroad

Chicago Board of Trade chairman David P. Brennan, heretofore the Margaret Thatcher of exchange execs when it comes to dealing with Europe, wherever that is, spent a weekend in Italy with Eurex officials. Maybe he should have read Henry James or Mark Twain first to see what happens when fresh-faced Yanks meet experienced Europeans. Anyway, he came back committed to an alliance with the Frankfurt-based electronic derivatives exchange and a vote before the Fourth of July.

Vice versa

Allianz, Europe’s biggest insurer, is looking for more tidbits to swallow on this side of the Atlantic today, chairman Henning Schulte-Noell said, and tomorrow, or at least next year, a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.