A definite pattern has emerged with what appears to be Morgan Stanley's cavalier attitude to emails.

It looks like the brokerage might have to have to make payments to hundreds of investors in arbitration cases after it withheld e-mails from them and from regulators for three and a half years, according to the securities industry regulator, the NASD. Even more damning, it made false claims that millions of e-mail messages in its possession had been lost in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre, reports the New York Times.

Steven B. Caruso, president of Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, summed it up aptly: "To use a terrorist attack to deny claimants documents in arbitration proceedings -that is about as low as you could possibly get." And so say all of us.

So far, there has been no evidence that any investor was hurt by the absence of emails but that is not the point, reports MarketWatch

The alarming part is that Morgan Stanley has form on sloppy email practices, a point I looked at here.

Some things just never change.