Shareholder Spotlight : Easterly Investment Partners – Lies, Losses, and a Love for Diesel

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When you look at who’s still buying Cummins stock, the pattern’s hard to miss. Easterly Investment Partners – the same firm accused of inflating municipal bonds and gutting retirees’ savings – just joined the shareholder list. It’s the kind of company that sees a billion-dollar emissions cheat and calls it an opportunity. In a rigged economy where finance feeds on rot, Easterly fits right in – gambling with other people’s futures, now and always.

The ROCMuni Wreckage – A Fund Built on Lies

You want to understand Easterly? Start with the ROCMuni High Income Municipal Bond Fund. Marketed as safe, stable, tax-free income – the sort of thing sold to retirees and cautious savers. Then June 2025 hit, and the bottom fell out. The fund’s value collapsed from $230 million to $17 million in a month. That’s not a dip; that’s financial demolition.

The lawsuits came fast. Investors accuse Easterly and its predecessor adviser, Principal Street Partners, of inflating valuations and stuffing the portfolio with illiquid, high-risk junk while pretending it was solid muni debt. Complaints describe “virtually unprecedented” losses – tens of millions wiped from portfolios overnight. Federal filings in New York name Easterly as a central architect in this collapse.

If true, it’s textbook financial fraud – a quiet con sold with a smile. A fund meant to shelter pensions instead burned them. And these are the same people now buying Cummins stock – a company fined for poisoning the air. If they can mislead retirees about municipal bonds, why wouldn’t they overlook a diesel cheat’s crimes?

Brokers, Kickbacks, and the Sales Sleaze

The rot wasn’t confined to Easterly’s boardroom. Broker-dealers like Osaic, Janney Montgomery Scott, and Stifel are now under fire for allegedly shoving the fund down clients’ throats. FINRA complaints describe a sales culture built on commissions and deception – advisers pushing speculative sludge on pensioners because it paid better than honesty.

Investor-protection firms like Iorio Law and Haselkorn & Thibaut are probing whether those brokers knowingly sold toxic bonds disguised as safe havens. It’s the same pattern you see everywhere: overhyped product, underinformed buyer, broker pockets the fee, client eats the loss. It’s the moral twin of Cummins’ own con – sell clean engines that choke the world, call it innovation, and cash the cheque.

Even before the ROCMuni collapse, Easterly’s affiliate, Easterly Securities, had faced arbitration over murky fundraising. Settled quietly. The culture’s clear: keep the lights on by any means. It’s less an investment house than a casino with a dress code.

The Cummins Connection – Profiting from Poison

In 2025, Easterly opened a fresh position in Cummins Inc., scooping up roughly 3,300 shares worth $1 million. Not massive, but meaningful – a signal that they see profit in pollution. Cummins, after all, is still staggering from that record-breaking $1.675 billion environmental fine for rigging nearly a million diesel engines. Trucks tuned to fake clean emissions while pumping out toxins. A global chokehold wrapped in corporate spin.

That Easterly would buy into that mess is no surprise. It’s the same instinct that drove them to flog junk bonds to pensioners: short-term returns, long-term ruin. They don’t invest in ethics; they invest in loopholes. Cummins sells the myth of “decarbonisation through diesel”. Easterly buys the myth, bottles it, and sells it to anyone still gullible enough to believe in “value investing”.

Their holding might only be 0.078 percent of their portfolio, but it’s symbolic. It’s the handshake between Wall Street and smokestack – the financiers who fund the polluters, then pretend to be shocked when the air turns to poison.

A Pattern of Rot

Easterly’s defenders will call ROCMuni an isolated failure, the Cummins stake a “strategic diversification”. But the truth’s uglier. The firm was among over 130 companies grilled by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 2024 for its role in ESG-related hypocrisy – a paper-green crowd talking sustainability while financing sludge. Nothing came of it, of course. The foxes still run the henhouse.

They’ve issued no apology to burned investors. No public soul-searching. Just the same hollow language about “stewardship” and “partnership”. It’s the language of rot – polite, precise, and utterly indifferent to consequence.

The Verdict

Easterly Investment Partners is not an aberration; it’s the blueprint. Overvalue the assets, underplay the risk, pretend it’s strategy. When it collapses, move on. And when the next polluter needs funding, buy in early and call it insight.

Cummins finds investors like Easterly because they speak the same language – profit first, accountability never. The diesel keeps burning, the air keeps thickening, and the money keeps flowing. The rest of us? We’re left coughing in the margins of their spreadsheets.

They call it diversification. TCAP calls it complicity.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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